what's up everybody welcome to SPM buzz and this is buzz with stars a bat on the red carpet and as you can see i'm hanging out with a beautiful very cool uh-huh a hundred percent how are you mama all right i'm feeling so great i'm excited thank you for coming for our lunch and you look so amazing thank you so much i mean let's start oh yeah what was the inspiration because i see there's a slit somewhere there's a slit somewhere you know i don't want my mom my mom you know i said i went to say hi to her i was like hi mom but you know i mean i'm you know i i feel sexy and i am a sexy woman you know so you know sometimes you bring out the sexy back yeah but i mean you know we you know we're in that era of all this you know nice shows like you know queen charlotte um bridgetown sounds like you know let me try a little bit of the you know that style so yeah but i just wanted to have a bit of you know glitter yeah and um yeah simposh did a good job and you look absolutely amazing so you like you like the hair Allah let's see the hair let's see the hair okay there you go okay is this flair by betty betty of course it's flair by betty we do a good job yeah yeah i mean let's get into why we are here today how do you feel how do you feel season two charlotte culture how do you feel do you know like when uh uh dnr uh yujin called me up and said oh be we're doing a season two mama i was like oh like our fans yanny yanny wally pubali so i really feel so grateful because i mean getting a season two is not easy like you have to prove yourself in season one that people you're worth watching now for people to actually you know like love us for people to want another season two because it's all it's all about the fans if the fans don't like it uh we're not gonna get a season two so i'm so happy we're here and i think season two will be so so super nice well so how was the reception as because i mean after every episode you get feedback from the fans which was that episode that you felt had a lot of feedback from all this the episode um i so for me i think it's with the ivana episode it was called um yeah it was called um miracle ivana and so i think that was a show that got so much attention because ivana by herself like she gets so much attention like we would be in the mall and people are like oh basically hello fine hi mom hi mana and so for i think that for me was the best episode because people just love to hear her story people love to see her and knowing she came from my tummy you know she's mine so i feel like yeah that was that was a perfect episode yeah and the feedback was crazy because so many parents would relate with me in terms of parenting in terms of what we've gone through as a family so it i think it was one of my favourites yeah yeah let me ask you because i mean you're the three sisters in Kenya we have you know siblings who are out there but i mean Eugene thought i mean why Betty why not Betty Charlo and the sisters why do you guys think Eugene actually chose you guys for a reality show i think because we are fabulous and um i think we also have a story to tell and uh the different characters that we have is is just worth you know paying attention to and um if you look in this country yes we have siblings but you know we are such a cocktail you know we're like a long island you know like we there's so many different personalities in our sisterhood and i feel you're just so colorful you know at first Gloria was not for the idea of being on a show she was like oh my god that attention i'm not so happy with it but season two she's bringing it like me and actually one of the episodes me and her have a go at each other yeah like it's like this season two she was like you know what uh yeah nice bare knuckles i cannot wait to see his drama it's a lot of drama like i can't even imagine that side of me has come because people are used to seeing all the strong Betty Charlo their solid entrepreneur now this time you see me crying you see me you oh it's so it's so but i feel also season one just made us very like we're so timid you know we're just kind of we're very afraid but yes guys that if season one was timid we were so afraid of sharing who we are but i feel like season two now like we're just so happy to share the real us so you'll see me like in my very vulnerable states like you'll see a side of Betty that people don't actually know the side that is not smiling all the time the side that is angry that the side that gives this you know the oh thank you so the side of Betty that is just just unknown yeah not the Instagram Betty this one is a very different one yeah i mean you're the big sister to gloria let's talk about gloria because you know she's the last one and you are on the limelight even before she was done with school what are some of them i mean yeah in campo not high school anymore what are some of the things or rather just advice that you gave her just to face the world and especially when it comes to the public criticism and all actually gloria i remember this time that she called me and people had taken a picture that she had posted on her birthday and they were really not strolling her it was like a it was a group of men on facebook and they were going at how you know she's so sexy and this one i want to do this to her and that really affected her so she was not okay i don't even know if she's gonna be mad for me talking about this but you know she's seen a very a very negative side of social media and she always comes to me and says you'll be i don't like what they're saying i don't like i don't i don't like the comments i'm i'm reading the comments i'm like you know what you have to protect yourself you don't have to read you know and i so i normally tell people like even jesus was not loved by everybody and he was the son of god so even for us the people who are gonna love us so dearly and the people who will not just they don't even care who you are they don't even want to hear but you can't be loved by everybody and everybody has an opinion about you but that should not enter here or here yeah i mean i'm talking about people just having opinions the other day you went to the coast you are having a good time and people are like hey when you wrote model those those role model people what do you want to tell them i'm a role model to my sisters and my daughter and um you know what how do you swim in pajamas do you swim in a bedsheet do you swim the other day i so size it jumping into the pool in a i was just like okay now okay he's here now hey but you know and to each their own and you know for me if i'm comfortable with my body i don't see why the public should be uncomfortable with my body and my instagram or my facebook is me if you don't like what you see just unfollow you know you nobody is forcing you to see better kiala nobody's forcing you you know to pay attention so if i'm comfortable with who i am i will i will post that bikini picture because i i like my thick body my thick louis camber body you know yeah and and let me tell you i don't know why we have this prejudice against african women and uh because when you look at the you know when you look at hollywood people out there you know they you know they go to the most almost naked so here i am at the coast having a freaking good time then you expect me to be covered up no are you guys no look for somebody else or or unfollow yeah but has this confidence always been there better you know i mean i was very i didn't have this confidence remember i had a very bad accident when i was young so you can see even see here i have a big scar and also here i have this big scar and some other places that you i can't show you but the thing is you know because i went through this accident so for a long time i was so i was so conscious about the scars that i have like from the accident but i just reached a time i'm like you know what i love me and i'm gonna have these scars all my life will i hate myself all my life so there was that moment even i remember being on tv and i was like you know i used to wear those high collars to hide the scar or a lot of scarves when i was reading news but after some time i was like ah what when day i mean i'm just like you know what this is who i am this is you know i just need to see the best in me and then the world will see it yeah yeah now we saw that another branch in that's my home girl and let me tell you you guys have money you guys have money um let me tell you something so my friends so after shave meru after shave by flair Nairobi flair by beti all of those are my businesses so after shave meru a friend of mine um you know came to me and said yo how about we open something together can i use your brand and i'm like you know what is so good for me because i can't believe i've built a brand from scratch and this is somebody who wants to buy a franchise in meru immediately i got another franchise somebody an interest a buyer in a doret he is still here in Nairobi shokimau um na kuru so therefore proposed those on the table but for meru i feel like um first of all they're really good people i before when i was at news anchor i did quite a number of shows in meru stadium and um you know i was there is kenora state you know and so i saw they're just lovely people and then so we did our research you know what is it that they want so the guy the thing is people in meru wants good things because they can spend but they don't have they're good things to spend their money on and so when we did our research you know interviewed a few people because that was like a whole month of research we did before when we thought about doing anything so their feedback was great we got our research to go on the ground to you know just see how you know what the hell is happening there and so they came back and said you know what this is viable they even have a cbk yeah one of the few counties that has a cbk and so we're like okay let's do this and the reception has just been and i fly by a virtue meru is coming oh shout out to my people in meru guys i come through come through and support betty for sure now let's talk about you wanting another baby if anna is just about to get a brother or sister how is that coming along look pregnant well if anna has been wanting a brother and sister for such a long time but i you know i know these are i am i'm dating and i'm dating a really nice person right now i don't know if i'm a drama i don't know if i'm a drama in my life this one is this one has potential inshallah so um for me like you know what is the time is right i definitely want to have a second baby but i don't know i forgot about motherhood you know diapers i'm just like which side goes where how does the baby sleep i'm going up because it's been even i've studied nine years in june yeah and so it's been nine years since i had a baby i know but let's just say that i've waited for a baby for a long time i've waited for a baby for i'm not really waited i'm you know let's see i'll be ready when you know godx and my yeah are we going to definitely want a second baby for sure are we going to be seeing mr man in this every uh the second season no no no no i think i'm still a bit i think um my my my my ex boyfriend and the breakup was too much like it was just mishandled by everybody and it was just okay fine we put ourselves out there and so the public really reacted to us breaking up and it was just a normal breakup i took him connections to a channel in the Kanye West you know but anyway i mean for this one maybe at some point in the future but for now um yeah he's also a very private person okay and uh he doesn't stay here and so let's see how it goes maybe we'll come back to maybe don't put some corner on devu but i don't know if you're yeah okay yeah but now let me ask you because you decided to keep your relationship private moving forward what are some of the advantage advantages that you'll see in just keeping that relationship private my god there's so many advantages to keeping something private and you know in the comments and so for me i feel like right now it's so easy to actually know somebody it's actually it's so easy to know and learn who somebody is without the pressure of the public and then also at least you know that this person is coming to you not for the fame not to get followers like other people who did that um not to get fame not to get you know um you know that publicity they just love you for who you are so for me not posting not putting them out there has really helped me to know actually this person is not after my fame he's not after betekiello the brand he just just loves berike ula nyumbani some taste new ale koivi no makeup shots name me yeah but are there days that he showers he would so much love that you just wanted to show us i know i mean the places he takes me like sometimes i want he sometimes he looks so good and i want to post him but i just say you know what for the better good let me just chill yeah yeah and also my mom is on my mom was like if you but they are post yeah you know my mom is always on in you know checking out i don't like it and then you try to block her opens another account yeah she's a she's a good mom i love her yeah i mean as i finish up and let you go today you posted um um you just shared something you say that when god reduces your circle that it means he had something you didn't you know here how has relationships now it just friends shaped you over the years oh my gosh i feel like hey man they have changed you know i used to be that person who was so welcoming to people and then you welcome people into your life and then kumbeth they're coming with daggers and i've experienced that so many times until i was like yo i need to step back and just not just share myself too much with with you know with friends and you know i don't force friendships these days if i don't feel your energy i don't chase it i don't look for you but there are those friendships that i have i know even you know for the launch let me tell your story so i was sitting back so we're giving you at all like okay you can invite this number of people so i started to think yeah okay so i was like the first two went down number three i'm like who is going to be i really struggled and you know like how and that's now where i said when god reduces when you see your friends reducing god has had conversations we didn't hear yeah yeah so i think it's really good and it's so peaceful just having a few friends unless i'll come to your rush or i'll come to your birthday intentionally but um i feel like as you grow older um you know there are things that you just change about you and you just learn about life i mean i've come from the worst friendships worst worst friendships but right now i can say i'm really at peace with the friends that i have around me and you'll see them i'm talking stories on media they're just so lovely people and but they're on the show i invited them for the on the show and they've really been supportive on the show and you'll see them yeah all right baby please tell people thank you girl please tell people why they should watch season two of chalo culture guys first of all we just want to say thank you for supporting us in season one of chalo culture now we are on season two and also we became a showmax original that means yeah i need to call pilot june you know yeah because being a showmax original is not easy like you have to prove yourself uh the numbers have to prove themselves and so thank you so much and so for season two i think you'll see a very different side to all of us very soft side to me because i'm always up or to entrepreneur you'll see a you'll see a different kind of Betsy and you'll see a lot of reconciliations a lot of rivalry fights but still a lot of love and it's gonna be nice it's gonna be nice looking forward to that amazing outfits and cars yeah thank you thank you so much cheers cheers oh cheers mama all right guys that was Betty chalo speaking to spm bars right here on bars with stars thank you so much for watching and make sure to catch season two of chalo culture


Today I want to talk about a concept that might not seem directly relevant to how you live your everyday life but in fact has huge implications both for metaphysics and the philosophy of mathematics. And it has to do really ultimately with the role of the mind, but you can also think of it this way. What is the relationship between the single and the multiple? Between composite and simple. Between the many, the one. Unity and plurality. Is it the case that you can have holes which are greater than the sum of their parts? So the example I love to give all the time talking about chairs, right? Philosophers love to talk about chairs. Is it the case that the chair exists in addition to the objects, the composite objects which compose the chair, the bits of matter, the pieces of wood which put it together, or is a chair really a word that just is a kind of shorthand reference for individual things but it itself doesn't exist? The way I like to answer this one talking about chairs is to say what actually exists are bits of physical space-time that are arranged in a particular way that our minds call a chair. But I think this gets at one of the essential functions of what the mind does which is to unify and to boundary the many into one. We treat multiples, a plurality of things as one thing. I think that's an essential thing that the mind does. So take the example of two, number two. What is the number two and how does it relate to the number one? Is it the case that two is a composite object? Is two actually composed of two ones? There's a one here and a one there and that's actually what the number two is. Do we put a boundary around those two ones and call them two? Is two some kind of third substance? Is two what happens when you somehow combine two ones? You get this new number that is the number two. What is it? I think it's the case that two is shorthand. Two is shorthand for multiple ones. Our minds are what put multiples together into one thing that we call two and this is of course true for ten, a hundred, a million and so on. A million units don't exist in addition to a million ones. Okay, so two areas that I want to apply this line of reasoning to. One is the universe and one is families. Is there such a thing as the universe? Is there one thing which is everything? Or is the universe a concept? I think it's the case that the universe is a way of talking about a bunch of individual little things that exist. I don't think there's the universe in addition to what we think of as being the objects within the universe. Now there are some philosophers who think that all is one. It's one thing that you're carving up in different ways but really all put together there's one thing that exists. I don't think that's correct. In fact, I almost say I'm certain of it. You just think about the contents of your perception. You think about the contents of your visual field. There are actual meaningful differences in the world but that's another matter. I think it's the case that when we say words like the universe we're talking about putting a bunch of things that actually exist and treating them in our minds as if they are one thing but there's no one universe out there. Take the family. What is a family? Does a family exist in addition to the people that compose the family? There's the mom, there's the dad, there's the kids, there's maybe the animals depending if they qualify. In addition to all of the people is there another thing which is the family or is it the case that the word family references a concept which our mind has come up with to unify the many into the one? It's much easier to talk about families in society than it is to always be referencing individuals, right? We come up with abstractions because they're really, really, really useful. I'm going to take this idea and I'm going to run with it to an extreme that you guys probably won't like but I'll eventually explain which has to do with the nature of the physical universe. What is the fundamental nature of the physical universe? Is there many substances? Is there one substance? Is there one physical universe? I think that the physical universe is composed of a bunch of simple units.  I call them base units and a theory that I'm working on.  As soon as you're talking about two units, you've interjected the mind because you're talking about plurality. There is no plurality as can be recognized in a universe without the mind. There is only the simple substances and they're just so happens to be.  So what is any of this matter? Well, this has really big implications for your life. It even has implications on ethics, right? Because what is a family? What is a society? Who are your neighbors? What is a neighbor's reference? Individuals or is an abstraction? How should you treat people in society differently than you treat individuals? Is society going in a direction in a different way that individuals are going? Metaphysics of the simple versus the composite directly impacts your ethical worldview, whether you like it or not thinking about these things. But also, believe it or not, this is going to have a big impact on the resolution for the mind-body problem. It has a huge relationship with how it could be that the mind and the world interact with one another. If we strip away all kinds of different properties from the physical world and just leave bits of matter that are located in space, that's all that's there. The colors don't exist in the world. All kinds of things don't exist in the world. It's just bits of matter that are on or off, that are empty or full. It actually is going to help us resolve the mind-body problem because what we think exists in the world is probably actually only existing in our mind. I'm not going to justify that. I'm not going to defend that. In fact, I might not for a little while, but that's where these ideas are heading. So a simple question you might ask to bother your family members and say, are we a family? Are we a family in addition to being ourselves? Do we compose something that is greater than us? And how you choose to answer that question is actually going to have a pretty big impact on the rest of your worldview.


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All right, shall we get rolling? Okay, so what's gonna, we're gonna get started now. Good morning. Good morning. All right, so in the back, can you hear me okay? All right, so a few pro tips about this room. The back of the room is terrible. When this room is filled with people, it blocks the sound. That's science. Okay, so if you're sitting in the back, you're going to be in an auditory disadvantage to sitting closer to the front.  But if there are seats available, I always recommend people move forward. We've also noticed an average of about 10 to 15 points difference between sitting in the back of the room and sitting in the front of the room. It's correlation, not causation, but keep it in mind. Question. Okay. All right, so welcome to PHY3333, CFB3333, KNW2333, Introduction to the Scientific Method. We have a lot to do today, and we'll begin with some introductions here in a moment, but we wanted to welcome all of you to the course. We promise you it will be a entertaining and very dense semester. Okay? So we have a lot of stuff to do today. This is the big first day to-do list. So let's start by going through our background information. So I will pass the microphone awkwardly to John. Yeah, this is a little bit of a scramble here. If everything works out, we'll have two wireless microphones hardly so we won't have to do this. Anyway, one thing you might ask, somebody always did, is why are there two of us? It's very unusual. You will find a class that is taught by two instructors who are here every time, unless, like Steve's at CERN doing research. Nearly every time. Yeah. But since we're here all the time, the reason is, let's be honest, the workload in this course is so great that one person would be overwhelmed. That's essentially it. Also, you get two different takes on things, which we'll understand in a moment. But there's reasons why there's two of us, and the primary one is the paper-creating load gets so huge that one person gets overwhelmed. Now me, background, you want to find out who we are? One, I've been doing this course. It's starting, finishing the 11th year of doing this. We've been doing this for quite a while. And it's been a lot of fun. My background is, if you go back and look at transcripts, is engineering. I'm a generalist at this point because I've studied and done so many different things that I've never been specialized in once. I consider myself as a generalist, but if you scratch deep enough, you'll find an engineer. And that means I have a particular way of approaching problems and dealing with things. Because, again, my background is what I call it.  So they're very different people. Also, as you might be able to tell, I'm a little older, Steve. Anyway. Half a long. No, you'll catch up. Just kidding. But anyway, the difference in background and both the necessity for two is why there's two of us. And you'll find this attitude going on. So, as John said, in contrast to his being a mile-wide and a foot-deep, I guess I'm more a mile-deep and a foot-wide. So this is me on the right. Just in case you're not clear. I'm Professor Stephen Secula. I am a member of the physics faculty here as well.  And my research is focused on studying the origin of the cosmos, the laws that govern the structure of the cosmos in the hopes of understanding the whole thing from the beginning to its eventual end. I do this using a massive subatomic particle collider located at the CERN laboratory just outside Geneva, Switzerland. That does mean that I'll be doing some traveling this semester. So I apologize in advance. I'll try to let everybody know about my travel schedule. But there will always be somebody on call to help you out if you have questions. So that's the bottom line. The thing in the background here is the piece of equipment that I get to use from my research. This is about two meters wide here that you're seeing. And this thing goes for half a football field in length, and it's about 10 stories tall. So this is in a cavern about 150 meters under the ground. And to get there, you've taken elevator ride. One of the days I took a tour of my own experiment, the elevator broke. And so they had to hold us down there for an extra long time. It happens. That's life. There's no stairway. Well, there is a stairway, but no one wants to walk 150 meters vertical. So, yeah. Okay, so next thing on the to-do list is about you. So one of the things that we're going to need you to do is to invent a code name for yourself. Okay? So let me explain. We're going to use this for gathering information for a survey that we're going to do. Now, do not use your actual name, including your middle name. You want nothing personally identifiable about yourself in the code name. It's okay if you use a nickname, but you really want to make sure nobody else in the room knows that nickname. So for instance, pretty pony. Okay? If I were to choose a code name for myself, you'd never guess that I would pick that. Now that means nobody gets to use that now. No one gets to be pretty pony. So think of, think for a moment, focus on what your code name is going to be. And you're going to put that code name at the top of the survey that's being handed around. Okay? And if we happen for some mysterious reason to get two code names that are the same, we'll try to figure out who did that and then we'll make one of you choose a different code name. Okay? We will toss a coin to decide which one gets to change. Right. It's fair. Right. Coin toss. That's a nice fair.  It doesn't always come up heads or something like that. So what you're getting now is something called the survey of beliefs. It's on a scale of one to five where five is you strongly agree with a statement. Okay? And one is you strongly disagree with the statement. You strongly disagree with the statement. Now zero would mean it's absolutely false and six would mean it's absolutely true. But we cannot prove anything as absolutely true or absolutely false in life. Okay? We can only say what the weight of the evidence is. So five is you believe strongly that the statement is true. One is that you believe strongly that it is not true. That's the strongest belief anybody can have. Okay? So I walked around and noticed that people were about typically halfway through or more through the survey. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to move on to sort of an interactive portion of the lecture here. And I apologize to the people in the front or not. That's the one. So why do I need this course? Believe it or not, you live in a culture or you're studying in a country where there are a lot of interesting beliefs out there. And many of those beliefs can be assessed critically using the scientific method because they make claims that are actually testable about the natural world even though the claims themselves may sound like they exceed the confines of the natural world they can be tested. Okay? So for instance, this is something we'll do in the course and we'll talk a bit more about this in this lecture. About 28% of Americans believe in something called astrology. This is the belief that where the stars are located in the sky on the day of your birth, maybe even at the moment of your birth can be important in this case, determines who you are. It determines your personality. It determines the events of your day-to-day life. You can pick up just about any paper legitimate or otherwise and find a horoscope section. And so if you're interested, if you know what day you were born on, which I hope you do, then you can look that up and you can find out what your horoscope is. And this is based on astrology, which is this claim that the positions of the stars on the day you were born affect you. They change who you are. 18% of Americans aren't sure whether or not they believe in it. So if you add those numbers together, you're getting to about 50% of Americans who either believe in this or they're not sure they don't know whether it's true or not. Okay? 60% of Americans believe in extrasensory perception or ESP that there's some kind of sixth sense. We're in psychopinetic powers that the power of the mind can be used to move physical objects or read people's thoughts. 30% believe that we've been visited by extraterrestrials. 25% to 50% kind of depends on how you frame the question, believe in ghosts, in faith-healing, and communication with the dead and lucky numbers. Now that might sound like something that is outside the realms of your ability to test it, but in fact, there are many specific claims made about ghosts, about faith-healing that can be critically assessed and tested. And it's this course where we hope to give you a toolkit that you need in order to make those kinds of assessments. And we will expect you to make those kinds of assessments through the class, okay? You're entitled to your beliefs. I have beliefs that sometimes seem a little cockamamie in the face of the fact that I'm also a scientist. Nonetheless, I don't let my science life cross into my belief life. In this class, you'll learn to assess exactly why you and others believe what you believe. Because why you believe what you believe is as important as what you believe, all right? This is really critical because firm beliefs can be totally wrong, and that may seem harmless sometimes, depends on the belief, but they can kill. And I'll give you some examples of this, okay? Now something I want to make you aware of, I am priming you. There is a psychological phenomenon, actually two related psychological phenomena, cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. Cognitive dissonance is an emotional response, fear, panic, anger, dread. When you receive information that conflicts with your established set of beliefs, that's cognitive dissonance.  We all have this biological response because we process information so that we can survive. And when we are presented with information that conflicts with prior beliefs, it can cause real problems physically, okay? You may experience this during this class. Don't freak out, it's normal. Related to this is confirmation bias. To avoid the feeling of cognitive dissonance, one strategy that humans have is to avoid evidence that conflicts with their beliefs. So maybe you only read a certain news site because you agree with the political bend of that site. And if you read another news site with an alternative political bend, you get very angry, and you don't like getting angry, so you only pick up the confirming evidence and you ignore the disconfirming evidence. That's confirmation bias. Again, a well-documented psychological phenomenon. It's a coping mechanism we have as living beings, all right? So because we know that humans do this, I'm human, you're human, you think he's human. Look at that shirt, okay? All right, you have to fight your fear. You will feel fear. You will feel nausea and dread at some of the things you're going to see in this class. I know, and some of you are like, what? This is supposed to be about the scientific method, but there are parts of this class where even I haven't gotten used to seeing some of it, and I'm an instructor in the course, all right? So it's okay, other people in the room are probably feeling it. Get your emotions in check. Remember your training, it will save you. Remember the toolkit we give you, okay? You're going to have to really fight the instinct, and you will have this instinct to refuse to believe something simply because it conflicts with pre-existing beliefs that may have been placed there by teachers, parents, friends, loved ones, religious authorities, whatever, okay? Again, the purpose of this course is to assess why people claim what they claim. All right? All that matters in science is the evidence for the claim, the quality of the evidence, and whether or not the claim can be openly and critically assessed. The minute you pull back from any of those, you have now exited the scientific realm, and don't expect science to have anything nice to say, okay?  So you have to be willing to be open, but not so open that your brains fall out. That's the trick in science. Keep an open mind, okay? But don't accept everything that comes across your plate. Learn to critically assess information. Learn... I want you to become an information consumer. Learn early on that I don't know is a perfectly good answer. If something comes up, it's perfectly fine to say I don't know. And it's also important in a way of thinking to understand that the fact that you have not seen or heard of something, which will happen all the time, you've never heard of that, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It doesn't mean that even if it exists, it's not true. If somebody tells me, I never heard of that, I accept that as a statement of fact. You never heard of it, but that's as far as I'm going to let it go. We cannot interpret that to mean it's not true. That's another thing to keep in mind. It's fine to say I don't know. I say I don't know to the graduate students that I work with probably two to three times a day. And it's shocking to them. My office is expecting me to have all the answers, but if I had all the answers, why would I be science? Science is about finding answers, not knowing answers. It's not about facts. It's about the methodology for establishing facts. And so when my graduate students come in and say, hey, I have a question, why does this do that? And I say, I don't know. And they look at me like I just landed from the planet Mars. Who are you and why are you being paid to do this? If I knew everything, I would take this microphone off and I would just go make a billion dollars. Okay? I don't. And I like finding things out. And part of that, a critical part of that, is admitting I don't know. That is the start of all learning. So thank you for making that point. That's excellent. Okay, yeah. So if you're done with the surveys, please pass them down to the person at the end of your row over by the aisle side.  And now that we're freeing you to participate a bit more, what I want you to do is pick up your flash cards. Okay? So this is the class participation exercise we'll do today. Now I'm going to have some poll statements or questions. There are three choices. A, B, C, if we take these cards apart. You see there's an A, a blue B, and a pink C. All right? Now I want this to be a private poll. I want you to feel like you're not under any peer pressure. Okay? And that you're not being judged by your peers. So here's how we're going to do the poll. I'm just going to pick a random answer and I'm going to pick C. So let's say I put my cards down in front of me. I shuffle them until I get to the one that I'm interested in answering.  And then I simply box them like this. And then hold it up to my chin. Okay? So all I want you to do is pick the card you think is your best answer to this question. Okay? This is what I want you to tell me. A is acquired immune deficiency syndrome. What's it caused by? Is it caused by a person's behavior? A is it caused by an invasive virus? B is it caused by divine punishment? C. And what are you doing? Put your camera phone away. This is about class etiquette. Mr. Pink, if that's your name. All right. So let's go ahead and all go ahead and poll. All right? So take a few seconds to do this. What do people think the correct answer is in their view? Okay? So there's no pressure. Okay. Thanks. You can put them all down now. Thank you. All right. So I saw a whole lot of B. All right? So scientifically the correct answer is B. A is caused by an invasive virus. All right? So the scientific consensus unequivocally is that A is caused by the human immunodeficiency virus or HIV. But there are people in the world who have had influence on other people in the world who reject this idea. They reject the scientific explanation of AIDS. One of these people is a professor at UC Berkeley named Peter Dusberg, actually a professor of biological sciences. So this is not somebody you can claim out as a philosopher or a history professor. It's just a nutball. Okay? It's actually somebody who would like to know how to critically assess scientific evidence. Okay? Now, Peter by himself might be harmless, but he has followers. Including, I haven't listed this here, President Tavo Mbeki of South Africa who changed AIDS policy in South Africa in response to Dusberg's claim that HIV is not the cause of the problem. And this caused mass outbreaks of AIDS in South Africa compared to neighboring countries that had instituted policies to deal with the HIV problem. Okay? One of the other people that's a famous follower of Dusberg's cause is a woman named Christine Mangiori. She's pictured here on the cover of this mothering magazine. She again rejects the HIV hypothesis that HIV is the cause of AIDS, well, really the HIV theory because it's been established by multiple lines of evidence now. So she followed his teachings and she refused to take the antirefroviral drugs that would prevent, in large part, transmission of HIV through the placenta to her infant children. And so she had two children. One of them was named Eliza Jane. She's pictured here around age two or three. And she died at age three of AIDS, induced by HIV. So pseudoscience, that is the rejection of science or the twisting of scientific structure to suit a belief system can have devastating consequences. In this case, it killed a child and eventually it killed Christine herself. She died of AIDS-related complications in 2008. So pseudoscience can kill. I have a question. Yeah. Heater's Dusberg? No, no, he's a published scientist. His ideas have been debated heavily in the scientific community and thoroughly run against the evidence that's out there. I mean, he's published on the subject. You can find his publications. If you find this to be an interesting topic for a research paper, come and talk to us about it. There's tons of resources, both sources of the claim, including papers and books that he's published and then scientific evidence, assessing the claim but also assessing other things like HIV itself. So Dusberg's claim is that lowers your immune response and that's what causes AIDS, not HIV. HIV is just opportunistic. It happens to get in there when you abuse drugs. But then what about babies that are born to women who didn't abuse drugs but had HIV? So you can already start to pick that claim apart very quickly, right? So there's a wealth of stuff out there, both for the claim and against the claim. And if you were going to write a research paper for this course, which you will go right to, you would have to assess evidence for the claim, evidence against the claim, and tell us what the weight of the evidence is for or against the claim, okay? Claim assessment. That's going to be in the heart of this course. All right, so that's a great question. So no, he's a scientist. I mean, he's like me or... He's done some good work. He's done some good work. He's done some good work. Yeah. And that's what makes this dangerous. Okay, another great example, Linus Paulin, Nobel Prize winner in physics and chemistry, held the belief that vitamin C mega-doses can cure all kinds of problems. There is no scientific evidence that vitamin C mega-doses do anything but make your pee very expensive and possibly to a vitamin C overdose, which can make you sick, okay? Linus Paulin, Nobel Prize winner, held this belief. Lots of other stuff he did, totally legitimate. That, cockamamie, all right? No evidence to back up the claim whatsoever. So this happens, okay? So you really have to ask, why does somebody believe what they believe? And even credentialed people can say the most outlandish things. In fact, that's when you're most at risk. When somebody credentialed in the area is speaking about a subject, that's when you drop your defenses. And that is probably when you most need to stop and think, wait, toolkit, what's the weight of the evidence? Whether the publications say, is this a minority claim and how should it be assessed? Okay, scientifically. So this is all good stuff, okay? All right, so another class poll. All right, so here we go. What is chiropractic medicine? A, a practice of manipulating the body that resulted from decades of good research on par with the best modern medicine. B, an ancient form of Chinese medicine based on the presence of 365 meridians in the human body, one for each day of the year. Or C, invented by a grocer in Iowa, it is no better than doing nothing and rejects the germ theory of disease. So, think about that for a second, okay? And again, secret poll. So cup the cards in your hand, all right, and then raise them up when you think you have your answer, okay? Just a few seconds here, okay? Okay, great, thank you. So I see a lot of A, a lot of B and some C. This is great. This is exactly what I wanted to... What's up? Oh, well, it was about, I'd say it was about 50-50, A and B for those that answered A today, roughly. Okay? All right, so A is a practice of manipulating the body that resulted from decades of good research on par with the best medicine. B is an ancient form of Chinese medicine and C is invented by a grocer. The answer is C. It was invented by a grocer. It is actually no better than doing nothing based on now a long history of scientific study of chiropractic and it rejects the germ theory of disease. Chiropractors were overwhelmingly against the march of dimes, which was the cause to raise money for polio vaccination, okay? Because they believed that chiropractic was all you needed to cure polio, which cripples and maims and kills. And it's caused by a virus. Okay?  The science unequivocally says that medical problems result from biological and chemical origins and the germ theory of disease unites these to explain how invasive organisms, or how, for instance, genetic traits handed down from generation to generation can cause disease in the body. Okay? Chiropractic medicine claims that disease is caused by bones being misaligned and interrupting the flow of nerve energy in the body. And the nerve energy can't be detected and the displacements often can only be detected by entrained chiropractors, so goes the claim. So, they won't show up on x-rays. X-rays can detect displacements at the size of, what? A few atoms if you really wanted to be precise about it. Okay? So, how can something that's displaced by a few atoms cause all the disease we know being humankind? Okay? So, that's the chiropractic claim. Is that most chiropractors actually have no medical training. They're not medical doctors. There are medical doctors that have degrees of chiropractic. Okay? They wise though. What's that? They wise though. Yeah, that's a bit safer to go to. If you had to go to a chiropractor, that would be a better choice. But they overwhelmingly, about 60%, reject vaccination to prevent disease because they think all you need is a routine adjustment and you don't need all these vaccinations to prevent polio and measles and mumps and rubella and chickenpox and the flu and all that stuff. They actually believe they can cure the common cold with adjustment of your back. Okay? There are famous examples of people suffering stroke or paralysis from neck manipulation. So, we'll have a chiropractor come in and demonstrate this for you when we talk about alternative medicine. You'll see this and what it looks like and what it sounds like. One of the more recent examples that was famous for my generation, not for yours, but it's a very handsome BC actor named Kevin Sorbo played Berkely's and was in a sci-fi TV show in the late 90s and early 2000s. And he regularly went to a chiropractor for one neck adjustment. He suffered three strokes in rapid succession in his car in the parking lot and that's because the strain of having your neck snapped can actually puncture one of the main blood vessels in your body and start causing you to bleed out because it winds through bone to get to your brain.  Okay? So, there's a lot of evidence now accumulated that the risk of stroke and other things like paralysis go up with chiropractic manipulation of the most severe kind. Chiropractic when compared to massage works just as well on things that can be treated with massage. But if you're talking about the common cold or flu or things like that it's not any better than doing nothing at all which is called the placebo effect and we'll talk about that later in the course. Yeah, another question. There was actually a couple of chiropractors decided they had they believed in vaccination and they were worried they didn't know how many of their colleagues rejected the germ theory of disease in vaccination. So, they actually conducted a poll in the early 2000s of chiropractors. So, they got a sample of chiropractors to respond to their poll and of the ones that responded about 60% of them said they don't recommend vaccinations for their patients at all nor for their own families. So, that's fairly recent data. It's within the last 10 years. Now, I'm sure it's changed. The question is whether it's gone up or down. I don't know. But I'm sure it's changed. Okay, so, if you go to our lecture on alternative medicine either in the slides or in the notes there should be a link to that paper and if it's not, I'll put it there. It was in my introduction slides from two semesters ago. Okay, another class poll. Alright, so vaccines are known through multiple research studies to A, prevent illnesses that once killed or maimed major fractions of the human population with negligible negative side effects. B, prevent illnesses that once killed or maimed major fractions of the human population but also cause huge modern problems like autism and C, be ineffective against diseases that affect the human population having only negative side effects with no benefit to the population. So, think about that for a moment and let's do the poll. And again, cup and hold, cup and hold. Hold them up for a few more seconds. Okay, John? Yeah. Okay, so I counted about six or seven B's and the rest all seem to be A's. Okay? If it doesn't be easy. Okay, so there were most of them were A. Okay, so the prevent illness, negligible negative side effects and B was about seven, six or seven people and that was that it does those things but it also causes huge modern problems like autism. Okay, so the scientific answer is that vaccinations prevent disease. Okay, so that's true. And vaccinated people then go on to protect the unvaccinated.  But they're protected by herd immunity. That is, you get a vaccine and I get a vaccine and our friend who's immunocompromised is prevented from getting the disease by us not transmitting it. Okay? There is actually no evidence whatsoever. No scientific evidence that things like autism are caused by vaccines or the things that are used to preserve vaccines for transport. All right, that's the scientific evidence. Now, there's one person who's essentially responsible for the modern claim that vaccines cause autism and it was based on a study of about a dozen sick kids in a British hospital. It was done by Andrew Wakefield and it was published about just over a decade ago and it was retracted from the journal about five years ago that was originally published in because it had been so thoroughly discredited both that he had taken money to basically form a treatment that would be an alternative to vaccines or other things that he had fake data and that he had used small statistics and misinterpreted the results of the data and so forth. It was a mess. Did not have proper permissions from the patients? Oh, yeah. And he actually didn't have proper permissions from the patients who were kids so permission from the parents to conduct the study in the first place. So just every possible online you could cross and cross. He had a patent Oh, yeah. That's what I'm saying. He was going to sell if he could get the original and take it off the market legally. He had a plan he was going to get rich on it. Right. So the problem is that this claim because it got published and it got advertised widely in the public media made it into the public consciousness as being real. Even though Wakefield study is the only one that shows this link and 14 independent peer-reviewed studies with much larger samples have shown no link whatsoever between vaccines and autism. Autism does seem to be related to other factors but not to vaccines themselves. We should know that the Lancet the Lancet which is the British medical journal they said if they had known the publication of the conflict of interest financial interest that he had everything of they never published a paper he would in violation of policy he would help all of that when he sent him the paper he didn't know. So it was bad ethics and bad socket so Randy could you grab that survey? It was bad in every way. So the consequences of this this has been in the news recently this is Jenny McCarthy she's now supposed to be co-hosting The View and she is an avid follower of Wakefield and she has claimed that her son was born with autism and it was diagnosed and then she put him on a special diet and his autism went away and she claimed that vaccines caused that autism in the first place. It's impossible to know actually what her son's condition was because medical records are private and they should be but that means that you have to wonder was he just misdiagnosed or something like that there is no evidence that diet makes autism better. So for people that have actually been genuinely diagnosed with autism diet doesn't really make a difference but the problem is that she leads organizations now that go out and tell people not to vaccinate their kids and that's bad because in the news recently there's been an outbreak of as it's a pertussis here in Texas measles here in Texas that was spread by unvaccinated people okay so and these are people that consciously shows not to get vaccinated it wasn't just they didn't have access to vaccines they explicitly refused to be vaccinated for this in the first place or to vaccinate their kids right in this case they were told by a religious authority figure that they shouldn't vaccinate okay so again you just want to stop and ask wait what's the evidence for that claim and is there you know I have to weigh personal choice and other things and we'll get into different kinds of controversies in this class you have to weigh certain factors in your life but then you have to ask what's the benefit and what's the science state okay and what's the risk and what's the risk of not doing it measles is not pretty you don't just break out in little bumps I mean your skin can look you can look like an X-man character in the most severe cases and it can kill a severe case of it alright okay so there's lots more examples on the web you can go and click on this link and read through them it parts terrific content alright so let's move on to course information and requirements so we want you to be able to detect potentially fraudulent claims okay and so that's what this course is for so again welcome alright now the first thing goals alright so I've kind of said this over and over and over scientific method that is sufficient to then be able to detect all kinds of scams and frauds and deception bad science and anti-science and everything okay so paranormal phenomena free energy devices alternative medicine claims intelligent design creationism denial of human induced climate change science-based medicine denialism misuse of data statistics so if you're a business major or an advertising major there's something in here for you we've got propaganda we're going to talk about propaganda who wrote the book on it you'll love to find that out okay who wrote the book on propaganda these are all the things that are used by advertisers and businesses and whole politicians and so forth to get you to have an emotional response so that you can bypass your brain and we want to teach you to detect it stop and think okay your writing is going to improve in this class I would wager that the majority of you have never actually written a research paper where you have to go and read primary papers the statements made about the quality of the data and the conclusions on the data this is a hard process you should come and talk to us as early as you can about what's expected we have examples of good papers you should look at those so we'll start giving the information out about how you can access that as we go forward etiquette just a few notes be on time to class I know that's not always possible for everybody if you have class changes but please understand that we give the attendance at 11 a.m. sharp if you're late that gives you less time to work on the quiz and if you miss the quiz entirely you get a zero for the quiz but we will count your attendance and I'll come to the attendance policy in a moment in class please turn off your mobile device ringer alert alarm if you have somewhere more important to be go be there okay understand as you'll see from the absence policy but that if you're looking for that call to come through just stay out let the learning environment be you know preserved for everybody else computers are a fine modern tool for doing things like taking notes and participating in ongoing course activities but if you're using them to Facebook to tweet to Instagram to Vine to Snapchat or anything else then if we spot that and we will walk around and look you and your computer have just volunteered to help us look up information for the rest of the class Wikipedia and Googling for us and the rest of the class you've been warned alright again if you have something more interesting to do go do it come here to participate in class no casual conversation during class even after you finish your quiz this happens a lot if you think you're being quiet enough you're not it's not that bigger classroom I know it's hard to hear in the back but trust me everyone hears you and we want you okay great there's a lot more detail on the web but the basic idea is that attendance and participation in class is 5% I'll come back to attendance in a moment homework assignments there are six of these still for the semester okay and abstracts you have to write two abstracts one for each of your proposed research papers those count a total of 10% and we drop the lowest reading quizzes these are given every day in class at the beginning of class at 11am sharp the cumulative 10% we drop the lowest one book report one and two this is you sorry book review so this is actually reviewing a book or a magazine article or something there's a whole list of things you can choose from we want you to review it as if you're writing a New York Times book review about this thing okay those are each 10% you then have a 7 page research paper and a 15 page research paper now the first paper is due around midterm I'd strongly recommend you do the 15 page paper first so that you don't then have a 15 page paper to write at the end of the semester when you are busy you say that again I strongly recommend that you write the 15 page paper first so that you don't have a 15 page paper to write at the end of the semester there's another reason for that the 15 page paper is 20% of your grade and you get to rewrite the midterm paper for a better grade wouldn't you rather rewrite the big paper in the middle that's worth more than the tiny paper in the middle that's worth less it's up to you okay you know your schedule is better than we do but I'm just trying to make you be a wise consumer here alright final exam in this room in December the date should be posted on the syllabus 20% of the grade okay and that will be a survey across all the things we cover in the class you should mention one detail about reading quizzes since normally if you have a homework assignment that's due on Fridays try to find it so your homework will come in on Friday right so there is no reading assignment for Friday because you're doing homework so on Friday we'll do something else that will look like the reading quizzes but it's whole or opinion it's meant to take attendance yeah it should define it as here so Fridays when homework are due you won't have a reading quiz on that Friday okay there may be an exception but it will be in the syllabus so we have again we have this website so if it's not already printed out it's evolving we have basically the lectures up to about fall break are determined all right extra credit we don't give it don't ask that's our first rule our second rule if we choose to give it and it's our prerogative it's offered as an equal opportunity extra credit to everybody in the classroom these are rare now I'm going to alter this deal a little bit this semester you have these flashcards you have them keep them love them bring them to class more polls this is very helpful for us okay so we can do a little rapid response teaching as we go here so the way we will enforce you loving these things and taking care of them like a newborn chick is that we'll give you extra credit occasionally we'll ask you to paperclip the cards to the reading quiz so keep the paperclip you got it's free on the physics department all right you can contact Fred Oleis and thank him for that you get one point extra credit on the quiz worth two points that's 50% now attendance attendance is a part of your final grade it's checked by these attendance quizzes or reading quizzes basically you show up you put your name on the quiz you attend it okay if you leave lecture after taking the quiz we have eyes four of them actually and we'll notice and we get to learn your names fairly quickly in this class Anthony and so as a result of that what's going to happen is we're going to see you leave before the end of class if you have something you need to get to let us know let us know you might leave early that day maybe whatever you need to leave okay talk to us we prefer information over a lack of information because we have to interpret a lack of information and we're not going to interpret it nicely right you're allowed six six unexcused absences six over the entire semester six unexcused absences I can't say that enough six as of the seventh course and here's why the data tells us that the more classes you miss the worse you do the faster you move to failing in the course you're going to fail anyway if you miss seven classes so we're just enforcing that behavior numerically okay no pleading no whining no butts excused absences do not count as part of your six unexcused so if you have a sporting event a religious exception whatever bring the paperwork to us in advance of the absence so that we know not to ding you for that okay again talk to us a university sanctioned sponsored activity yes university sanctioned sponsored activity excused so if you are as I like to say if you happen to be a member of the SMU squirrel chasing team and you're having a competition and it's fierce with UT this year I mean squirrel chasing has never been ever copied for us and just make sure we get it that guy wants to talk yeah I know okay yeah so why don't we hand out these attendance quizzes and I'll just go on here there's short and easy stuff this is the astrology oh sorry astrology okay so let's talk about that so we are going to have a trained astrologer it's like a family friend of Dr. Scalises or something like that yeah sister in law okay she's going to do an astrological reading so here you need to invent a code number okay oh this is the code name sorry code name okay so use your code name on this we don't want you to use any information that might be used to look you up on something like Facebook or Google and then get personal information about you that can be folded into the astrological reading we want those to be done using only the information astrologers claim that they need and that is your birth information okay so fill that out in I don't know a few weeks or something like that we'll get readings back for each one of you we'll get 25 of these things for 64 and then we'll go through those in class and we'll see how accurate they are okay one more thing this is going to be when you finish the astrology basic data right and here you're going to need a code number this is different from a code name it is four digits up to four digits four digits and don't use any part of your driver's license number your SS make up something neat nothing personally identifiable no birthday no bank account credit card number nothing there's a reason for this we post grade summaries online on the website and this number is what we're going to use because the university really doesn't want to use anything else it must be a random number that you invent right this is approved and if you don't have a license on the on the website or it'll be at the top with a blank and you can't pick at which is yours right so non personally identifiable four digit random number memorize it write it down in your notebook someplace you're going to need that for a whole class so write that number down okay so while that's going on let me just talk about plagiarism plagiarism well last semester we had gone 19 consecutive semesters with at least one instance of plagiarism in each semester that we detected and we've gotten very good because surprise surprise the teachers who teach you how to detect scams, lies and frauds are very good at detecting scams, lies and frauds not perfect you can test us if you'd like but we're from any source any interpretation of something from any source and you don't cite the source theft plagiarism using sentences figures, tables, ideas without citing the source plagiarism we minimally reward such misbehavior with an f in the course minimally reward plagiarism with an f in the course and then as a bonus cherry on top of that cake of crap we additionally reward such behavior two of those on file you go before the academic council and they are the honors council and they're way meaner than us and we will file on every case every provable case if we have evidence it goes okay so don't do it because then you're just making evidence for us alright so please if you're struggling if you're struggling and you're tempted to cheat come and talk to us wipe that thought from your mind and talk to us alright one other thing don't shuffle we will say early on and that's about taking a paper from somebody else we have had cases where a student has gotten a paper from this course from a prior student in the class a year or two earlier and turned it in just by changing the name on the paper the service we use to text this including drafts and in case you're not familiar with the honor code which it should be the person who supplied the paper will also be filed on for an honor violation if they're still alive if they're still alive but if they're not we'll detect you and you'll get screwed and that's all that really matters the key is while you're here to protect yourself and I mean protect yourself from an honor violation don't let people never never give anybody a machine readable copy of your work never give a thumb drive never email do not let anybody else ever have a copy of a file of a paper you've written that's for your own protection because if that person takes it you have no control over what they're going to do with it and in many cases the reason they want it is they're behind on the assignment they've got to turn it in tomorrow and they'll just change the name on the paper and hand it in and then you are on the line as well and it doesn't take much for the software to raise red flags for us that's for your own protection in addition we've had papers that people have handed in that when confronted the student confessed because they got the paper from a paper mill so we're not stupid we know how to read and we know from your work what your level of potential is let's say and if we see you over exceeding that that's a statistical outlier you'll learn about those and we ding like a bell that really sets off red flags for us so go ahead you can try but there's no guarantee that we won't detect it I just recommend you come and talk to us our doors are open talk to us hand those down and you're free we'll see you on Wednesday


I think Jack Hawaii rule of law and a new abnormal, whatever that may mean. And we have the good fortune to have with us today. Professor emerita for familiar Randall University of Dayton School of Law, and leading national and international scholar on race and racism and the law. I'm Jeff Portnoy. Partner at Kate shuddy and former University of Hawaii region and constitutional and First Amendment law expert, and David Larson. Recent chair of the American Bar Association section of dispute resolution now the immediate past chair and professor at the Mitchell Hamlin School of Law in St. Paul. David so how's the nurses strike there. What's going on. Well, as you may know, it's the largest nurses strike in American history.   What's interesting about this strike and I've been following it is that as I'm listening to the president of the Minnesota nurses association and listening to her speak. And I followed a number of strikes over over the years.  What I'm hearing now in her voice is is a strong sense of desperation. 37,000 health care workers have left in the last couple years left the profession for a variety of reasons exposure to coven being overworked, but every time a health care provider leaves that means it's more work for the remaining ones. And it's gotten really difficult for the nurses that are still working. They're having to work extended shifts and really they're just exhausted. And right now I think the reason they're in strike is they've just hit a boiling point they they're at their wits and they don't know what to do they're exhausted. They've been risking their lives for a couple years. They, they've been angels. They've come to work under circumstances when other people may not have come to their jobs. I don't think they've been terrific, but they're exhausted. And we're in a real crisis situation because, on the one hand, they want better scheduling fewer hours, more pay. But on the other hand, the health care organizations the hospitals have had to suspend elective surgeries, cosmetic surgeries, nobody's getting those jobs over the pandemic. And a lot of the income that they were getting for a lot of these elective surgeries gone away. So, their income has gone down. But if you are losing people you need to be able to attract them that might might mean higher wages number one. And if your current workers are dissatisfied and are threatening to leave, you might need to pay higher wages number two. And now we've got this very difficult situation where we, it's, it doesn't seem possible we're going to increase income flow in the short term, but they're very strong financial demands to make the health care situation better than nurses. So, yeah, it's a really troubling situation. The one thing that might help is that, you know, sometimes this can help in lieu of any kind of wage increases that nurses have been asking for more input and control over the scheduling that they'd like to have more cooperative committees set up so they can, they can dictate a little more when and where they're going to have to work. And if the health care organizations the hospitals can be a little more lenient on that a little more open to allowing more self government in terms of scheduling the, maybe that can diffuse the situation. If it has a question. I haven't really followed the nurses strike but I've been having talked healthcare law is something that I am really familiar with in terms of the stresses and one of the questions that I have because I feel like profit and nonprofit hospitals and organizations do this trick. They talk about income coming in as a reason for not being able to increase wages, but at the same time, they have these huge financial reserves. And the question I always had was okay you're in comes not coming in but draw from your financial reserve. This is a crisis, you know, what are the financial reserves of the hospitals and people in in in your area. I know that I don't know the financial reserves but it's thank you for bringing up the point of finances because one thing that actually has been very troubling is that as with many entities in the United States, when you look at the multiples of what CEO salaries had to do with the average worker, the latest report had it at 324 times the median wage. And so you've got healthcare workers who are hearing the explanation I just said about the financial pressures who are also looking at administrators and executives, at least at the high end that are getting paid very well still multimillion dollar salaries.  And those salaries actually have gone down during the pandemic, as much as 25%. But they're saying still, you're still resting at $2 million a year $3 million a year, and we're well below $100,000 a year. So that's another reason where why we're out on this picket line is because of that, that pay in. Yeah, so that's playing into that to Professor Randall. Well, now that Biden settled the rail strike and get on a train and get to Minnesota and settle the nurses strike. It's that easy. Well, hopefully that'll happen. Is the, is there a mediation service involved in that one for the labor negotiations. Well, so it's, you know, it's, it's unlike with the rail strike and the railway lay. So with the rail in the railroad industry, the National Mediation Board. And, you know, so, and there are some mediation obligations that are statutory doesn't exist under the National Labor Relations Board, they're not the same obligations. And one of the calls by the hospitals, and there's 15 hospitals that are being struck, which actually ended last night is a, it's a situation almost was thrown down the gauntlet nurses went on strike for three days. And the kind of demonstrate that we're serious about this, we're not going to go out and strike for an extended period we've been without a contract for six months, which is true. We've also been frustrating. So they said, Okay, we just want to show you that we're serious we're going out for three days. And that ended last night and they're back at work at a lot of the hospitals but saying that this is a warning and we can go out again and next time it might not be for just three days. So one of the one of the calls for the hospitals is that we haven't done enough mediation. We have to do more mediation. What the union is saying is that we need to get a little closer on these huge broad requests before mediation will even be productive we don't think we think that we're so far apart that going into mediation would be a waste of time, because the mediator is not going to be able to pull us together whether that's true or not I don't know I guess I'm not convinced of that I think a mediator can always help, but, but unlike the situation with the railroads there isn't the statutory requirement for mediation under the NLRA that there is under the railway labor act. Jeff you followed labor for years and it sounds like one of the things that may be a little different than the traditional compensation and benefits negotiations is now that workload and resources are becoming a major problem in not only healthcare, but in the air transportation industry in teaching and education and maybe across the board. How does that. Is that happening and how does that change things in labor. Well, I really can't talk about what's happening other places but all you have to do is look at Hawaii. We have more tourists now than we've ever had over the last four months, and our tourism workforce is down depending upon who you talk to and what you read, 20 to 25%. Particularly at the hotels. So I mean there's there's a disconnect somewhere because the hotel rates in Hawaii now are the highest in the United States and very close to being the highest in the world. All you have to do is go online and see what it costs now to get a hotel room in Hawaii, and then understand that the workforce has been reduced by a fifth or fourth depending upon who you talk to. So, you know, you have to fight to get your rooms clean because they haven't wanted to rehire the, you know, the housekeepers. You have to park your own car because they haven't hired the valets. You're lucky you can get a reservation at a hotel restaurant or any restaurant in Hawaii for that matter now these days because they can't get staff. So, you know, there's a new paradigm and, and, you know, you can blame it on COVID very convenient. A lot of people do. But I think, you know, it's a number of factors depending upon the industry. I represent lots of doctors, including lots of ER doctors and over the last two years I've, I've heard multiple horror stories about lack of staffing and emergency rooms and what's going on here. I can't talk about other places. Wait times are the fact that the homeless are using the ER is their personal physicians on a daily basis.  As David just suggested that, you know, they don't have the resources so I don't know. I mean, maybe we'll become like Europe where major industries will go on strike for a month until the public decides that they can't live with it anymore. You know, I mean, spend any time in Italy or, or England or France, where every day you wake up wondering all right who's going on strike today the postal workers, the baggage handlers. I mean the disruption is unbelievable. I was in England when they went on strike in London on on the on the subways it it was brutal. And, you know, they were out for a long time so David David's the mediator and probably has been involved in these negotiations I've been tangentially involved actually represented the nurses here at one point on something quasi related so I don't have any answers. I just look at the situation and so I don't know, you know, you look unions were dying. Right, three or four years ago, the number of union memberships were way way way down and they had virtually no power. And then in the last couple of years there's been a rebirth, you say that's good or bad.  Who knows. Well, one of the things is the. I'm so happy to see the unionization and the strikes, because the working conditions for American workers is low and middle level workers is horrific. No, our contracts scheduling people in a way where they working less than 30 hours a week, but they're not they don't have a set schedule, and they have to be available for people paying wages so low that people qualify for welfare and for Medicare. The working conditions for people in America is horrific. And it's largely because we haven't really had strong unions. We don't even have to have it across the board, just like I think it's 15 to 20% of the population was unionized and struck. I think that would drive up condition in, in, in the whole in across the board, but there's a reason people are striking and until people want to get off their profits and their high wages on the high end. I think it's going to continue because people have horrible working conditions. Yeah, one of the one of the kind of the impetus for the National Liberation Act will go back to Woodrow Wilson, who said that the unionization supports the democratization of industry in the workplace. I think that's part of the impulse for unionization right now that the schedules as Professor Randall says the schedules were being offered and demanded to follow our exhausting and we we just feel we need to have more control over our own lives and our work schedules and the demands in the railroad industry. One reason they're that's, that's the railroad workers when it strike is that, again, as, as Jeff says the workforces have shrunk across the country, and they're not enough railroad workers and people are being asked to work very long hours long consecutive days. And so not only long hours per day but many days in succession and and what they're in they've got a kind of an odd attendance system where they are penalized for any time away from work including health visits and if you get COVID. And I think that's one of the things that we need to do is make sure that the workers run against you and you're going to be penalized for any kind of absence. And the feeling is that that's, that's impossible, you know, we have life threatening diseases and we're being penalized on our employment when we have no control over it. We're in these conditions so part of what's happening with the unionization is this recognition that as employers are putting more demands on because of a shrinking workforce that they're pretty much helpless unless they speak with a collective voice and and do things like going strike. Well, it sounds like the part of the movement has been from the traditional compensation and benefits disputes. Certainly in the last 40 years with increasing income inequality and just egregiously unequal distribution of wealth that that's now become an issue as well as the resources and the choices of the workers themselves. A lot of work was shown by the pandemic to be capable of being done remotely. And there are a lot of people that would greatly prefer that. But you look, you know, the irony here is, and this may be a little bit of an overstatement, but I don't think it's much of an overstatement. Trump's supporters. If you look at it by economic breakdown and education. Far more are in the lower demographics of income and education. And he's the same president who is so anti labor and appointed his own cronies to the Labor Relations Board and all the other related federal agencies that deal with issues like this.  And you can agree or disagree with the politics. The Democrats have always been pro labor, maybe too much, in my view, and other people's views, but on the opposite end, the Republicans have been the exact opposite, at least in recent memory.  And right now, they're not voting with their pocketbook. Yeah, why, you know, like, I speculate on this and I certainly don't pretend to be an expert when they think of you and why is it what Jeff is saying is absolutely true. And when you look at the red states and the populations that are supporting Trump, they tend to be the lesser educated lower income individuals and you ask how can it be, because the policies are hurting them. And what I've speculated is that Trump also presents a kind of a philosophy of discrimination and hate, and that there are people who are making the choice that even though this is going to cost me financially, I feel so much better if my worst instincts are approved and emboldened, that it's worth it for me.  Well then, the fact that's going to cost me some money, I'm okay with that trade. You know, there is there is one thing that he plays on and I'll defer to the press in a second. He does pander to those voters by saying the reason you're not getting more than $9 or $10 an hour is because they're hiring all these African Americans and illegal aliens who have taken all your low paying jobs. That's why you're not getting $15 an hour. And it's a strategy that has historically worked. I mean, we look at Trump and his supporters as if they are somehow different, but if we look at the history of the United States, white people and the whole concept of whiteness is something born out of a wall here in the United States. I mean, I'm not discounting the historic issues of how race was formed, but the concept of whiteness was formed here in the United States in 1792, when the United States first passed the first immigration law that said you cannot come to this country unless you're white. And what that resulted in is people who here to before who didn't identify as white, but French or German or Australian or, or whatever, saying hey, I'm white. And what led me in is it resulted in a huge number of cases, in litigation, people saying I was denied entry because they said I'm not white. I am biologically white. Don't look at my skin color. Look at my biological connection. The concept of whiteness started at the beginning and has been something that politicians have appealed to throughout our history. Ignore your, ignore your interest and support the people who will protect your whiteness. I was going to say it may take a little too long but when Norwegian cruise lines came out to Hawaii, they were able to sail within the islands, despite the Jones Act, because they made an arrangement that they would hire a certain large percentage of Americans. If you've been on cruise ships anywhere else, you know, 95% are Indonesian and Filipino and Eastern Europeans. Well, I know this because I was their lawyer. They soon learned that young Americans weren't willing to do the work that was necessary for the pay they were getting. That wasn't what they were used to. And so there was a real problem in staffing the ship. And so that's part of it too.  And so who fills the void, right, people who are willing to work for $10 an hour, because they've come to this country because they were making nothing where they were. So I mean, there's a real dilemma, particularly in the service industries. Professor Randolph mentions people ignoring their interests to protect their whiteness and I'm not, I would maybe even frame it a little differently, that that one of people's interest, given human nature is to feel better about yourself by putting down other people. That's part of our interests.  But it's, it is, I think it's part of being a human being. So, and it's a powerful, it's a powerful drive. And I think what is happening is that that's such a powerful drive and it's so comforting to me to know that it's okay for me to feel like that and say that and act that way. And that's going to cost me some income that's going to cost me some luxuries. I don't care. I'd rather, I'd rather have that trade.  This other thing is very comforting to me. And I'm willing to lose over here to gain over here. I have great insight the connection to the identity politics. And the workplace conditions as a part of the identity of entire sectors of people, black, Latinx, Native American, and others. And the question of whether there may be more choice now. So one of the questions is looking historically, but we saw that after the last major recession depression. When FDR came in, and some of the same measures is stimulus infrastructure building and employment at levels where it had not previously been supplemented. Are those things going to help are they going to make a difference. I think they're going to make only marginal difference for the black community, because I think that they're going to be implemented in a color blind way, which we, and in a racist society. Whenever you start a program that's supposed to be color blind, but supposed to affect everyone equitably people's biases, people's conscious and unconscious bias programs design all work to continue racial discrimination and and so I think that they're not going to have not withstanding the, the, the Democrats, saying that the idea is to deal with some of the historical racial wealth problems. Yeah, I think that in the end, it's only going to be marginal and not just for blacks for Latinx and and for Asian Americans and for Native Americans as well. You think low unemployment is is going to help things because everybody will be able to get a job, be able to raise themselves up. Low unemployment is usually the way you pull yourself out of recession. But the problem is that a lot of these jobs being created are not particularly attractive jobs. They are not high paying jobs. They're not very rewarding work and they're difficult and they're strenuous and sometimes dangerous. So even though we might be encouraged when we see unemployment numbers, when you look a little deeper. Sometimes those numbers are a little more revealing as to whether or not that's going to be our way out. And right now it doesn't seem to be because we do have those low unemployment numbers, and yet we're not getting a sense of satisfaction and comfort in our communities on people aren't coming back to work. So that alone isn't the solution. So in our last minute or so. Your thoughts on where all this is likely headed. Jeff. All this. What's this. Racism, unemployment strikes, I mean, wealth is very, you know, look, the more things change and more things remain the same. And you go back and look at history as the professor has done. We go through cycles, and we're going through another cycle, you know, we've had this pandemic. And that is new. Since 1917 and 18, really, and we'll see how the country comes out of it. I mean, the good news is, we're only six weeks away from an election and I've talked about this before where those of us who were very worried about losing complete control of the federal government are now feeling very optimistic that at least we won't lose the Senate and who knows what's going to happen in the house. So, you know, all is not lost, but are things going to change dramatically one way or the other. I doubt it. There'll be ebbs and flows. That that's my view. Professor Randall, your thoughts. I agree. I don't think things will change dramatically and I think largely cause the Democrats are going to be unwilling to make changes in how the Senate operates so that they can do stuff that are dramatic. Yeah, I, you know, there's, there are good reasons not to vote for mega Republicans, but there's also the hope that the Democrats are going to make a difference is a misplaced hope. It's going to do marginally better, but not make a significant difference. The unemployment rate among African Americans continues to run twice as much as whatever the unemployment rate is for whites and that's not because African Americans don't look for jobs and don't want jobs and don't try to get jobs and won't take a job because of the wages. It's because they don't get offered jobs don't get hired don't get interviewed. And, and so they. So, so that's not going to make much of a difference. I don't think the elections is going to make a much of a difference with that. David, coaching thoughts. I always like to try a little optimistic and hoping that when the fact that we're seeing, for example, unionization taking hold in industries where it never existed before. It's never in the Amazon warehouses wasn't in all these fast food franchises that that that employers will stop and think, why is this happening and what can I do to avoid this and make the workers more comfortable. So we're not so adversarial. I'd like to think that there'll be an epiphany that we can actually voluntarily make things better, rather than going into labor strife. And that's what I'd like to see. Thanks so much, Professor Randall, David, Jeff, all of you who have joined us or will join us to view this. Come back again in a couple of weeks. We'll be back. More issues, more choices, more questions. Thank you. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktecawaii.com. Mahalo.


Four years ago today I saw my amputated leg for the first time. What a bizarre experience. If you are squeamish, skip this one. I still remember this moment so clearly. It was absolutely surreal. It was super swollen and just got stitches out so it looked terrible. What a crazy and hopefully once in a lifetime moment.


The naturalness of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 infections, SARS-CoV-2, appears to impact the respiratory system and lungs, however, the etiology of many cases exhibited several various features of the disease. This review gathered contemporary information from PubMed, Scopus, and ScienceDirect databases regarding possible effects of the virus in generating reactive oxygen species and causing oxidative stress. The literature suggests that COVID-19 is associated with reactive oxygen species and its comorbidities mostly joined with oxidative stress including hypertension, cardiovascular, thrombosis, obesity, and diabetes besides of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma. This article was authored by Hardy Rafatbaki, Helgaard Ali M. Farag, Abdul Hamid, H.L. Bilbezi, and others.