Amen. So this morning we're continuing a random sermon series that we've been running for the last couple of years called How Things Work, and we've studied a lot of things, especially scientific things. I like, I like science as most of you know, and we look at, you know, scientific things, how the universe works, how time works, things like this, and light of the Bible and what the Bible says. The Bible talks about all of these things. One of the subjects that is most interesting to me, besides science and engineering, is the subject of economics and the economy, and how the economy actually works. So I got to thinking, you know, as you've read, you can read many books on the economy, many different people have different theories on economics, as you may know. But I got to thinking, you know, over the last few years, the Bible must talk about this. The Bible must say how the economy works and what would stop the economy from working. That's what we see in Deuteronomy chapter 28, and we're going to look at this morning. So the title of the sermon this morning is How the Economy Works. How the economy works. We'll first look at some, of course, we're not going to go over the entire subject of economics. It's very complicated, and there's many details of that subject. However, we're going to look at one overarching philosophy this morning. I'm going to explain to you first the secular philosophy itself, and what people have written about it, what people have found out about this idea in the economy. And then we'll look at that in the light of the Bible, and what the Bible says about that. So let's get into it this morning. I brought a couple of object lessons. I don't think I do enough object lessons, actually, in the church. But I brought a couple of things to explain a theory this morning. So the first thing I'm going to do is explain the secular theory itself. And then, like I said, we'll look at the Bible and what the Bible says. So here we have, what is this? This is a computer mouse. This is what most people would think is a very simple device. Everybody probably uses this device every single day of their life. You probably take this device for granted. You think, well, this is even an older one. It's got a wire on it, right? So you're thinking, this is a simple device. It's probably pretty easy to make. Well, what would you say if I told you that there's no single person on the planet that knows how to make this? There's not a single person on planet Earth that knows how to build this, that knows how to put this together, that knows how to make this.  Well, let's look at it. First of all, it's got a wire. And around that wire is rubber. It's got a rubber insulating jacket around the wire. That rubber is refined and made from something. There's oil in the rubber. There's oil in the plastic that goes along the case. So you have oil drillers. The oil industry is involved in making this piece of equipment right here. But guess what? The oil driller and the person speculating for oil in Western North Dakota or Texas or Saudi Arabia, he has no interest in this mouse. He has no idea how to make this mouse. And nobody is telling him he needs to drill for oil so we can make a computer mouse. What are some other things that we have here? We have a metal USB port. So somebody has to mine. There needs to be a mine that is mining iron ore probably and refining that metal. So without that mine, the surrounding town that I grew up in an area that had mines everywhere. And those mines, you know, you have a miner that goes to work every day and he mines some material. In this case, iron to make metal. And he goes and he has people that he spends his money with electricians and plumbers and things in his area so they can come and fix his house and fix his car so he can drive to work without those electricians and plumbers and restaurants and all these things that support his life. He couldn't go and mine metal. He couldn't mine this. But he also has no idea how to build this. He has no idea. He could care less about where that metal goes. He is just doing what he's doing in his own self-interest. There's many other parts. There's many other electronics inside this device that are designed by, you know, different companies from all over the world. I myself was in the semiconductor design industry. I actually designed microprocessors for close to 10 years. You say, you designed microprocessors. Wow. I mean, that's amazing. You know how to build a microprocessor? I have no idea how to build a microprocessor. I was a tiny cog in that machine. I was the digital circuit designer for a microprocessor that had many different kinds of circuits inside it. Many were digital. Some were not. Some I had something to do with. Some I didn't. I had nothing to do with the manufacturing process. Nothing to do with the packaging process. Nothing to do with, you know, a lot of the testing that goes into building that actual microprocessor. But the point is nobody knows how to build a microprocessor. No single person knows how to build a mouse. You say, yeah, but these are really complicated things. You say, these are really complicated things. What about something simple? What about something simple? How about like a standard number two pencil? Surely. Somebody, some single person knows. No single person on the planet knows how to build this pencil. You say, what?  It's six minutes long. We'll link it to this sermon. You should watch it. You should press pause on the sermon and watch it. It'll help you understand what we're going to talk about going forward. But basically this pencil is made up of many different things. There's a cedar jacket around graphite. So somebody has to be out in the woods cutting down trees. There's a lumberjack somewhere.  He has no idea how to build this pencil. He could care less about this pencil. He could care less where the wood that he cuts down goes. You have somebody that is mining graphite from somewhere probably in a different part of the world that has no idea how to build this pencil could care less how to build this pencil. Nobody is telling the lumberjack or the graphite miner you must go out and mine graphite so we can make a pencil. No one is telling them to do that. They're simply doing it out of their own self interest. Again, you have metal. You have the metal grommet or whatever you want to call that on the outside of the ferrule I think it's called. On the outside of the pencil you have a rubber eraser. You have many different people from all over the world, you know, being supported by all sorts of different other industries that help them do their job. You know, after all, the lumberjack, he couldn't go and spend his time cutting down trees if he didn't have people supporting his life like people feeding him, people producing food so he could go to a restaurant and eat, things like this. He would be spending all his time surviving. Instead, it all these different things that support the lumberjack to cut the cedar tree down to make this pencil make this an efficient process that just happens on its own and that's the idea that we need to explain this morning is that voluntary, voluntary spontaneous human cooperation is what builds this pencil. It's people who are free to interact and free to and listen to this free to pursue their own personal interests. You say what? You say they're not, you say somebody didn't didn't order all these people that we must all collaborate together. Nobody stood up, no leader somewhere stood up and said, we must all collaborate together to build pencils. No one did that. No one is doing that. It is simply people producing and pursuing, I'm sorry, their own self-interest and this pencil miraculously puts itself together because every single transaction that people are free to make with one another and we'll see that in the Bible, you know, drives the the formation of this pencil. So watch that video, iPencil, if you're watching this on YouTube but the point is, is what I'm talking about is what a man named Adam Smith wrote about in 1776 called the invisible hand, the invisible hand of economics. So let's talk about what is the invisible hand. This is what we first need to understand. Adam Smith from, he was born in 1723 and he died in 1790. He was a Scottish philosopher and an economist and in 1776 he wrote a book called An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. It's commonly known to most people as just the wealth of nations. And this book, well I talked about many different things regarding how economies work and how a free market will work. He observed this phenomenon of the invisible hand and he wrote this from Adam Smith. This is the secular idea of the invisible hand that we first need to understand. This is from Smith's book. Now if you haven't read the book it's because it's 900 pages long. Most people haven't read the whole thing but there's a lot in there. Okay we're going to talk about just one kind of overarching aspect of the book called the invisible hand. This morning from every individual he says every individual endeavors as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry and so to direct that industry that it may produce that that its produce may be of the greatest value. This is the efficiency. He generally indeed this is the individual neither intends to promote the public interest nor knows how much he is promoting it. This is talking about how it's just an individual free to pursue his own interests. He is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. The man cutting the tree down had no idea that his tree would become a pencil. He had no interest in that he doesn't need to have an interest in that by pursuing Adam or Smith continues by pursuing his own interest. Don't forget that that's a key point here. His own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectively than when he really intends to promote it. So what this is saying here look this is this is a secular observation of a real thing is what we're looking at. It's like gravity. It's like gravity. The invisible hand just happens. It exists. It can be tested just like gravity just like I can drop this pen and test gravity itself. Look the invisible hand can be measured. It can be scientifically proven just like gravity can. What he is saying here is that people that are free to act in their own self-interest will increase the prosperity of all even though they do not even know that they're doing it. It's a spectacular thing. Every free market transaction free market transaction sends market signals to direct quite an amazing thing which is to direct how to build a pencil or a computer mouse or whatever. It's a miracle of sorts. Let me give you another example. Consider the following scenario. Consider the following scenario. We have to put our thinking caps on now. A weather event destroys a huge crop of wheat in Russia. Since the supply of wheat is compromised wheat prices rise across the globe. The first effect is for consumers to react to the higher prices by cutting back their wheat purchases. When things get more expensive we buy less of those things which helps to conserve the remaining supply for only those who value it most highly. Price fixing is always bad. Always. Ostensibly those who rely on wheat for survival in businesses that need it for other product products can continue to you know this is the people that value it the most highly. There is also an important secondary effect. Wheat farmers in the United States unaffected can now sell their wheat at a higher profit. After all their inputs were unchanged. Wanting to capture more profits. Existing farmers increase production. Maybe they also take wheat that they had stored in storehouses as the bible would call it and put it into the market to gain those higher profits. Again they're acting on their individual self interest. Wanting to capture more profits existing farmers increase production. The supply of wheat increases again to meet global demand. Over time the price falls back down. The potential millions or billions of actors in this hypothetical situation they don't need to speak to each other. They don't need to like each other. They don't even need to know each other or even be at peace with each other. Together their actions help to move this invisible hand of the market to fix a worldwide problem. That is the invisible hand. All the people need is the freedom to act in their own self interest and they're able to magically fix a problem that is worldwide. Even though that's not what they were trying to do. That's what happens. This is why this is why by the way the things that I've been telling you as far as how everything is tied together with all of the different actors acting in their their own self interest. This is why you say why is this relevant? This is why there is no such thing as an essential or non-essential business. It's it's a fake premise that was brought up to us a year and a half ago. You cannot have a government that pays people to stay home and expect this to still work. You cannot pay businesses to not produce because it's not about the money. It's about the connections. It's about the production efficiency itself. All that interaction is necessary to not break this chain that creates the pencil. Proof you say well what's the proof?  Business isn't called them essential. Well look at all the empty shelves today. There's your proof. There's a lot of missing pencils today. If you say why why do I go to Home Depot and I see all these shelves empty for this product or this product or their certain foods that aren't available this is why because there is no non-essential business. Yet last year we had people running around saying I'm essential. I'm essential.  If you have a business that people will pay you to produce something you are essential. That is the bottom line. The example the example we can pull from last year was restaurants. Restaurants were deemed non-essential.  Well guess what? There's this lack of demand for food now which hurts the food producers, the growers, the ranchers, the dairymen. They're all hurt. They're all hurt.  Maybe they had to sell land. Maybe they had to take on debt. But look just like the lumberjack needs the diner to help him become more efficient. Look he shouldn't spend his time making food for himself. He should be spending his time cutting down trees. That is an efficient machine. There is no non-essential business. It's an oxymoron actually. And if you you adopt that it breaks the invisible hand. It stops the invisible hand from working. So let's go back to the idea of the invisible hand before we let's finish this up and then we'll look at what the bible says. Back to the invisible hand. First of all it's a paradox. It's a paradox to believe to understand that that some individual pursuing his own individual self-interest could benefit the overall society. That's a bit of a paradox but that's exactly how it works. That's exactly how it works and it's been proven. But that's why the fact that it's a paradox is why so many people get this wrong today. This idea. But the key again is people are free to pursue their own self-interest and then that unleashes creative energies to benefit society as a whole. That's how the invisible hand works. But as with all secular observations without considering God without considering his word without considering the bible we will not have a complete understanding of the invisible hand.  Such an amazing thing must be in the bible. Well it is. Let's look together. Look at Deuteronomy chapter 28. It's a long chapter in the bible. But in Deuteronomy chapter 28 we see the story of a nation. We see the story of a nation. I mean the beginning part of the chapter is talking about the blessings of the nation. Of what could happen in the nation. Or maybe you could even say the wealth of the nation. In the first part of Deuteronomy chapter 28 that brother Ryan just read for us. And then the other part of the chapter is the opposite. Is the opposite of the blessings of the nation. So the first half look at verse number four. The first half is this. The first half what we're seeing is the invisible hand itself. In Deuteronomy chapter 28.  He's talking to individuals and their productivity here. Look what he says in verse number four. Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body. You know if I say to you blessed should be the fruit of thy body. I'm saying that your labor will be blessed. I'm saying that the labor that you do will be productive. I mean whatever that labor is. And the fruit of thy ground. Now he's talking about farmers and producers. And the fruit of thy cattle. And the increase of thy kind and the flocks of thy sheep. So here we're seeing here we're seeing a productive people in verse number four. And we're seeing a division of labor here which is a whole another study in itself. But we're seeing a division of labor. People doing different things and they're being productive in those things. Look at verse number five. Blessed shall be thy basket and thy store. Now we're talking about markets. In verse number five. I told you the bible talks about everything. Look at verse number six. Blessed shall thou be when thou comest in. Blessed shall thou be when thou goest out. Now you know what you're talking about? You're talking about a productive people who are interacting with each other. Who are going to each other. I mean he's saying blessed.  What are you doing?   This is what we're seeing in the bible in Deuteronomy chapter 28. We're seeing a productive people. We're seeing commerce. We're seeing commerce. People traveling to and fro freely interacting with one another freely. Look at verse number seven and guess what will happen when you have a productive people. When you have a nation that becomes wealthy. When you have a nation that becomes wealthy and you have the wealth of the nation. Look what you have in verse number seven. The lower shall cause thine enemies that rise up against thee to be smitten before that face. They shall come out against thee one way and flee before thee seven ways.  A productive people is actually it's actually not really I didn't really say that right. A productive people will be a strong nation. You see how the productive individual creates a strong group. You see that? Look it's no different than with our our ministry here.  And the first person we went to the door they're just like well I don't believe that and I think that you know you should be a Mormon and you're just like I don't know should I be a Mormon?  You will benefit the group. Look as a strong soul winning ministry we will go out with the gospel. We will go out with the gospel on an individual basis. We will be strong individuals and guess what? We'll benefit the whole community. We'll benefit the whole city. We'll benefit whatever part of the world that we go to. All because we're strong individuals. That's what we're seeing in the Bible here. We're seeing the invisible hand in the Bible right here. Look at verse number eight. And the Lord shall command the blessing upon the in thy storehouses and in all that thou set thine hand unto. So he gives some examples about farming and production and raising cattle but he says look every this is the division of labor right here. He says in everything that you do in every individual the plumber the electrician the engineer the the analyst the accountant whatever in everything that you do you will be productive and everything that you set your hand unto the labor of all kinds will be blessed. He shall bless thee in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee a productive people as a wealthy nation right there. Look at verse number eleven. And the Lord shall make thee plenteous in goods in the fruit of thy body and the fruit of thy cattle and the fruit of thy ground in which the Lord swear unto thy fathers to give thee the Lord shall open unto thee his good treasure that heaven to give rain unto the land in his season and to bless all the work of thine hand and thou shall lend unto many nations and thou shalt not borrow. This is right here in verse number twelve. He is talking about the prosperity of the individual and how it will benefit the entire nation. Exactly what Adam Smith observed in the wealth of nations with the invisible hand the individual pursuing his own self-interest will benefit the nation. That's exactly what we're seeing here in verse number twelve that it's the Lord shall open up unto thee his good treasure. This is the invisible hand. Guess what folks? Guess what we see in the Bible? The invisible hand is God's hand. That's what the invisible hand is in the Bible. Now this is where of course now you're saying okay now is the Bible believing Christian things are making more sense. The invisible hand is God's hand. Of course you know many people you know speculate on Adam Smith's religious views. I don't really think he had any. He wasn't really a religious person in most of the things that I read. But look if you don't have the Bible you miss things. You miss things. But look this what I've explained to you and what Deuteronomy chapter 28 is showing you is how the economy works. That's how the economy works. Now let's talk about destroying the visible hand. Let's talk about how the economy stops working. And this invisible hand which we now know is God's hand. How it stops working. So Adam Smith's observations about the hand are correct. They're correct. They were correct observations. He also observed what would stop it. So let's look at his observations on what would stop the invisible hand from working and then we'll look at the Bible what the Bible says. The intervention look intervention to stop free interaction is what Adam Smith observed will cause the invisible hand to stop working. That's what Adam Smith it's all about the free interaction and the ability to be free and pursue those interests and to go to and fro freely on government intervention. He said this Adam Smith believed that government should limit its activities to administer justice enforce private property rights and defend the nation against aggression. Agree. Boy have we gone beyond that today. Any more than this disturbs the force of the free market which is the invisible hand. This is what Adam Smith observes in his book. While the land while the hand the actions of the individual the is the action of the individual the invisible hand is driven by the actions of the invisible the individual the action of the government itself for the good of the many this is the paradox this is the paradox it's really about the individual acting in his own self interest that will benefit the many but people think and the government thinks that if they come in to intervene for the many they end up hurting the individual is what actually happens but they come in and they they that's why every single liberal policy especially liberal economic policies have the exact opposite effect because of this paradox right here. They end up hurting the very people that they try to help I mean a perfect example of this the most simple one I could think of was minimum wage laws I mean any kind of price fixing destroys the hand itself look it destroys low I mean it literally destroys jobs it destroys low skilled jobs and then it raises prices on cheap low quality items look here's the thing it hurts the very low income people it claims to help because guess what rich people don't care if a hamburger price doubles rich people could care less if a hamburger is now ten dollars instead of five but it's the poorest in the society that suffer from that type of policy so this is why liberal economic policies have the opposite intended effect so look while Smith's observation on government interference is correct he misses the root cause back to the bible let's look at Deuteronomy chapter 28 can we see this interference in Deuteronomy chapter 28 yes we can go to Deuteronomy chapter 28 and look at verse 48 look what the bible says in verse 48 Deuteronomy chapter 28 and verse 48 so once again it's all about the invisible hand which is God's hand that we see working in Deuteronomy chapter 28 is all about the individual being able to freely interact in his own self-interest and as soon as a government comes in and stops that free interaction the invisible hand stops working look at Deuteronomy chapter 28 verse 48 so Adam Smith he he blamed it on the government he basically said yes it's the government that is doing this which is not untrue but he missed the root cause and we get the root cause from the bible look at verse 48 therefore shall thou serve thine enemies which the Lord shall send against thee in hunger in thirst and in nakedness and in want of all things and here's the key part right here he shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck until he have destroyed thee look it's talking about an invasion here in this particular case but it also speaks of going into bondage which guess what is the opposite of freedom it talks about a yoke being upon you which is chains which is fetters it's the opposite of being look if you have a yoke upon you you cannot go to and fro freely you cannot have commerce it's the opposite of being able to make your own individual decisions go to Proverbs chapter 28 Proverbs chapter 28 the bible talks about this a lot Proverbs chapter 28 so we're seeing here it is it's the same thing it's somebody putting a yoke upon you someone interfering with your freedom to be able to go in and interact freely as you would like to do someone's business being shut down and deemed non-essential or whatever any kind of interference that stops that freedom the bible talks about it in Deuteronomy 28 48 a yoke is upon your neck but why but why look at Proverbs chapter 28 verse number two the bible says this it says for the transgression transgression of the land many are the princes thereof but a man of understanding and knowledge the state thereof shall be prolonged the bible here is saying look it says for the transgression of the land many are the princes thereof you know what that means that means the more the land transgresses against the Lord the more people that will rule over you the more people that will be putting yokes of iron on your neck you will not be free and the root cause for the transgression of the land that's what Adam Smith missed because he didn't have the bible Deuteronomy chapter 28 look at verse number 10 look at verse number nine look at verse number nine and look God gave us plenty of warning here in Deuteronomy chapter 28 look at verse number nine the Lord shall establish the holy people unto himself as he has sworn unto thee if thou shalt keep the commandments of the Lord thy God and walk in his ways look the in God's hand working in a nation that Adam Smith observed as the invisible hand which depends on freedom it's conditional the bible says so while secular analysts say that the hand cannot work without free interaction they're not wrong but they miss the root cause they miss the root cause look it needs freedom that's true but the reason we lose freedom is because we transgress against the laws of the Lord the bible shows us here that freedom will go away because of the people in that nation turning from the Lord that's the true root cause that we need to understand as Christians look even the founders of the country knew this to a degree even the men who gave us this great country that it used to be knew this John Adams has a famous quote from 1798 don't miss this he says this he says we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion he says avarice that means unchecked greed avarice ambition revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net our constitution is designed only only for immoral and religious people it is wholly inadequate for any other as we throw off the bible in our society we need a government to control us we need the many princes the many princes will fill the gap and adam smith actually addressed this in a secular way in the wealth of nations and i don't want to get too off on on a tangent here but he basically said yes the government needs to help help steer the interests of the people no no that's where he's wrong the bible needs to help steer the interests of the people and when you have a people that are steered and have their interests and their their desires and and their wants and their needs and and they are focused on the bible then they will be free and then they will not need an overreaching government to come in and and then god's hand will work in the economy so the government is the effect it's not the cause remember i love cause and effect remember eighth grade the government is the effect the cause is an immoral and and unreligious people that is the cause of people they'd abandon the bible many are the princes there of turn back to proverbs chapter 28 proverbs chapter 28 this is what we're seeing today folks this is exactly what we're seeing today look these wicked leaders are a result of a nation turning from the lord these stupid leaders are a result of a nation turning from the lord see pestilence part number two and part number three from last year but look at proverbs chapter 28 and look at verse number two so you say what are we to do what are we to do you're just going to like tell me like you know that how this works and that it's all being broken today and then you're just going to like tell me to just go have a nice sunday no i'm going to tell you how we should respond as well what are we to do how is the christian to respond look at proverbs chapter 28 in verse number two for the trans or look at the front of your bulletin for the transgression of the land many of the princes thereof but let's look at the second half now but a man of understanding and knowledge the state thereof shall be prolonged so here's the thing how do we act as christians how do we how do we see this happening and how do we not how do we act how do we respond as christians the first thing is this we need to have understanding and knowledge we need to understand why things are happening we should understand these things folks we should understand why these things are happening that's the whole point of this sermon as you understand you can look around you and you can understand as a look as a bible-believing christian we have the answers here that's a serious advantage everybody else is like ah why why is all this happening trump you know and they're all just trying they're grabbing its straws at anything we know why it's happening because we have the bible God has given us a serious advantage as bible-believing christians we understand it's the whole point of this sermon scream it from the house tops tell everybody why it's happening turn to 2nd Corinthians chapter 5 2nd Corinthians chapter 5 tell it look we go out and we preach the gospel that's great but we should tell people this stuff too we should tell people you know what because you know what there's a lot of good people out there there's a lot of good people out there who maybe they don't understand the gospel they don't know anything about the bible and they're just like they hate what's going on today guess what we have the answer we have I bet you they would love to have the answer so they wouldn't be so confused and you know what to drive them to the gospel as well look at 2nd Corinthians chapter 5 and verse number 11 look what the bible says knowing therefore the terror of the Lord we persuade men but we are made manifest unto God and I trust they're made manifest in your consciousness look with our understanding and with our knowledge of what we know we should persuade men with that because we know what's happening we know why it's happening and we know what's going to happen if it continues this way so we should be out there we should be we should be persuading men look many Americans don't like what's happening today but they have no idea why it's happening they're focused in the wrong direction look they're missing the root cause that's why they're missing the root cause of the problem turn to hoséa chapter 4 in general we should have knowledge that's my first point on how we should respond we should have knowledge of what is happening look at hoséa chapter 4 and look at verse number 6 we should have this knowledge look at hoséa chapter 4 look folks it's all about it's all about it's not just it's not just knowing the bible it's knowing what's happening around you what's happening in the world how these things in the world work and then looking at those things through the lens of the bible that's what makes that's what gives you so much knowledge and understanding is what we're talking about today look at hoséa chapter 4 and 6 this is my people he's saying my people he's saying this is us this is us god's people my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge you know we could just not know anything and just be destroyed so here's the thing we should know the root cause and you know guess what we shouldn't just go along with the masses otherwise you know we end up just repeating stupid communist taglines you know like i'm essential oh you got three christians standing around in a group and you know talking about you know how they just got everything shut down and i'm essential and i'm essential and then the other two oh i'm not i'm not what in the world we shouldn't be going along with this stuff it's garbage we know where it comes from and we should be educated and we should understand and have this knowledge look that's not going to persuade anybody like maybe you should be a central brother that's not going to persuade anybody normal good you know like normal good people if they see us just going along with that stuff think about this normal good people will think we're part of the problem that's what they'll think and they'll be like oh you know these christians are no different these christians aren't you know these christians are no different when it comes to all this stuff happening we need to recognize that it's a philosophy of the enemy at least don't repeat it especially don't adopt it understand it have knowledge and here's the second thing turn to axe chapter five here's the second way we respond and this is historic no one can argue this look at axe chapter five axe chapter five every good christian throughout history and we've got this documented like you wouldn't believe that every christian has done this every good christian axe chapter five look at verse number 28 the christian must still act morally is point number two turn to axe chapter five look at verse 28 saying now this is uh the disciples you know they were told not to preach it's like stop preaching stop going in the temple stop preaching we're gonna lock you up we're gonna kill you look at verse number 28 the jews are saying saying didn't we not straightly command you that you should not teach in this name and behold you have filled Jerusalem with your doctrine and intend to bring this man's blood upon us then peter and the other apostles answered other apostles answered and said we ought to obey god rather than men look when it when god's hand goes away and we start seeing this happen when we start seeing this happen as we're seeing it happen today in response for ourselves personally for our families for our church for our neighbors we still have an obligation to act morally and not participate in the wickedness to obey god and not men look this is romans 13 in action right here in action acts chapter 5 turn back to deuteronomy chapter 28 this is in deuteronomy chapter 28 2 look at verse number 21 and verse number 22 look the nation the nation that is not harken to the lord is going to do wicked things and we'll see that in deuteronomy chapter 28 as well the nation that is not harken to the lord that is transgress the lord is going to do wicked things it's not just the government the people are going to go along with it the people are going to go along with it look at verse number 21 the lord shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee until we have consumed thee from off the land whether thou goest to possess it the lord shall smite thee with a consumption with a fever and within inflammation with extreme burning with the sword and with blasting with mildew they shall pursue thee until thou perish bad times look at verse 45 moreover these curses shall come upon thee and shall pursue thee and overtake thee till thou be destroyed because thou harkest not under the voice of the lord thy god here we go again to keep his commandments root cause and his statue and his statutes with he commanded thee and they shall be upon thee for a sign and for a wonder and upon thy seed forever it's an example but look at verse 47 because thou service not the lord thy god with joyfulness and with gladness of heart for the abundance of all things on an individual level folks even when this starts happening in the nation we need to remain right we need to continue to serve the lord thy god with joyfulness and with gladness of heart look we need to not go down this path that these individuals went down look at verse 53 I mean it gets worse look at what these people start doing verse 53 and thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters these people were eating their children these people were murdering their children for their selfish desires look this happened in the bible this prophecy came true when a nation was under siege people started literally eating their children so that the man that is tender among you and very delicate his eye shall be evil toward his brother and toward the wife of his bosom and toward the remnant of his children which he shall leave people were doing evil against their brothers against their children against their spouses they commit evil against themselves these people look the individual christian folks when this starts happening is still responsible for the moral situations that they find themselves in I mean the medical mandates is a perfect example from last week it's a perfect example look if somebody comes and tells me to do something immoral I am still responsible for doing the right thing even though I can see I see the root cause I know what the root cause is we've turned away from the lord I get it but I'm still going to be faced with moral situations personally that I have a responsibility to act in the right way according to what the bible tells me it's the same thing it's the same thing with anything it's the same thing with the essential non-essential garbage property being stolen government overreach turn to Matthew chapter 10 people turning in other people look I'm still responsible for acting in a moral way where all these things start to happen I mean think about all the people turning in their neighbors and their brothers and their sisters over the last year is ridiculous look at Matthew chapter 10 and verse 21 Jesus knew this Matthew chapter 10 look at verse 21 and the brother shall deliver up the brother to death look that's not supposed to be you that does that Jesus is saying these things are going to happen but hey don't you do it and the father of the child and the children shall rise up against their parents and cause them to be put to death we have to not be part of any of this so the Christian has an obligation to his or her conscience to resist this when this starts happening look this is why so many Christians have been killed throughout history folks because when the tyrants came in it was always the Christian saying we're going to obey God not you dead that's how it worked let me give you one example from the martyr's mirror in the sixth century Benjamin this is a Christian that's responding to I mean think of the martyr's mirror by the way all these guys had to do I mean they were against many of them were against infant baptism that the church was bringing in all they had to do was stand in front of a judge and say yeah infant baptism is fine I shouldn't have said that would that take away their salvation if they did that no they just no they're just like we won't comply have a nice day that's what they did and then they were killed horribly because they wouldn't say something because they just stood up and they resisted look at this quote from the martyr's mirror in the sixth century Benjamin asked the king this is a king telling him to stop preaching he says stop preaching Benjamin asked the king what punishment beloved king does he deserve who deserts and renounces thee and thy government and submits himself to and serves another lord he's like what would you do to somebody if they renounced you and they decided to serve another king is what Benjamin says the king answered such a man deserves punishment on body and property yay the severest penalty of death Benjamin again asked again saying what punishment does the man deserve who forsakes God the creator of all things in order to exalt one of his servants as God and to give a creature the worship due to God alone these words so incensed the king that I can't read you the rest of the story in church but Benjamin didn't make it through this but he just said he just said he literally just said I don't recognize your authority he's like my authority is God he said he basically said in a clever and philosophical way I obey God rather than man and you're man do your worst so look folks Adam Smith's invisible hand is created through freedom we get that it's the product it's the product of freedom and what God's blessings and God's curses are much more complicated than we think because it's really it's really the invisible hand that Adam Smith observed in the wealth of nations it's the mechanics of God's blessings on a nation am I explaining that well enough it's how it works it's how God blesses a nation it's the gears and the cogs of how that blessing works and as a nation turns away from that that that machine breaks down that machine stops working as we leave God's word so we'll lose our freedom and look it's important to also know let me just this just came to me just now but it's also important to know how this machine works and how the gears and everything there's many gears and many cogs and many parts of the machine so we can have a spectrum of what portion what where we're at in this decline does that make sense the more you understand how this machine works and how it breaks down the more you will be able to look throughout history and kind of get an idea of where we're at understanding knowledge folks but look as we leave God's word then you know you're gonna start to see people fall for the lies of socialism communism essentially the devil's religion and the machine of the invisible hand which is God's hand will start breaking and that's the complete picture of Deuteronomy chapter 28 as a nation follows God it's free the mechanic the mechanism at that point of the invisible hand the blessings of God on a nation is working well as men turn from God the government steps in they get more and more oppressive that freedom declines the machine starts to break that's the cycle that you need to understand this morning it stops the machine and then those blessings they become curses and that's what you see happening in Deuteronomy chapter 28 it's a spectrum it's a spectrum now think of California I'm amazed at this state we're the most wicked state in the union we're leading the charge as far as leaving God but you know what California shows you California shows you the long suffering of the Lord is what it shows you I mean somehow this economy is still going somehow this machine is yeah and we see we see bumps we see empty shelves we see but look these are the signs that we need to pay attention to but we see it still working it's the patience of God that's what I see but I'm like man somehow I still have a job through all this that's the patience of God right there however we just need to understand as we keep turning from the Lord you know it's going to get worse we're going to start to see things get worse and worse unless we turn back to the Lord then maybe the machine starts working a little bit again but it's a spectrum pay attention but also don't forget the second point that as people turn from the Lord as the nation as the state turns from the Lord Christians must still remain faithful to the Bible throughout all the troubles that come Romans 13 always applies we must obey God over man through mandates immoral orders Christians must object this is why we have been killed for centuries folks this is why so Smith was correct in his observation but he needed to be a student of the Bible as well he was missing that piece when we understand the world and the Bible that's the whole point of this series whether we're talking about scientific things whether we're talking about engineering things we're talking about economic things you know it it's it shows us the way the Bible shines on our surroundings and the things that are happening and look it's really to prepare you for what's coming you will know more as you know what's happening in the world as you know what's you're seeing around you and as you know the Bible you will know more folks that's how the economy works and that's how it stops working let's bow our heads and have a word of prayer


Good afternoon and a very warm welcome to all of you. The hall is fully packed. I think we should have a huge round of applause for ourselves. The scientists say that human brain starts working as soon as the person is born and continues to work until you speak in the public. So I'm a bit nervous, of course, but we are here to listen to the fireside chat with the fire brand leader, Sharad Chandra, industry veteran, and who does not need any introduction. Our topic today is combining the words of connected screen and DOH. Sharad, the OH industry, you know, has been ideating and reinventing itself, you know, for a very long time. And it has undergone, you know, major transformation as well. And DOH particularly is getting a lot of attention, you know, because I think it combines the perks of digital marketing in the real-world impact, right? So we would like to understand from you how much progress DOH has made over the last decade. Oh, well, so that's a tough question, but thanks to, I think, Leticia, Rajeev, and Ajay a little while earlier, many of the facets of digital OH and what progress it's made have been wonderfully, let's say, amplified. So the first point is, is there been movement, tremendous movement? Is it all in the right direction? Ajay has cautioned us saying, listen, you have kind of made lots of right steps, but not necessarily enough or enough in the right direction. So while he's been very, where's Ajay, I think he stepped out. He's been fairly schoolmaster-ish and harsh in the assessment of digital OH, it's saying we are at 0.1 or 0.2 on a scale of 10. I'd like to believe, I think, for a young industry which has always been on the fringes of marketing investments, so to speak, I think the industry has done fairly well for itself, certainly not eight out of 10, but certainly not 0.1 out of 10. So I'd probably say it's more close to three or four out of 10. So that's the kind of progress digital OH has made. We are, of course, extremely, or I would be very nervous or anxious about the lack of clearly articulated norms, standards, and practices for digital OH is leapfrogging, as we can call it, into the next level. And I think that is where a lot of work is to be done. Yeah, fantastic. And do you think that this success has actually helped to gain acceptance from the mainstream digital media industry? So the good part about adding digital is a prefix to any initiative is it has a lot of early adopters. So you will have virtually anyone and everyone wanting to do digital and labeling anything and everything as digital. So therefore that part of it is solved, saying that will people want to do digital? Yes, will it be the right kind of digital? Most likely not. Will it give the kind of benefits ROIs that marketers and investors expect even lesser? So I think that's where the who's who of the Indian marketing and OH industry are here, people. I see Numi here, I see Arminio here, all of who have seen I think three or four epochs in OH advertising over the last five decades emerge. So, you know, we have the brain stress, we have the people who have shown us how you can tame the market, how you can leverage the entire, let us say tailwinds and also many of us have the bruises of trying to do so to share and therefore I think that's the best cocktail you can get for the way forward. Yeah, true. Sure, how crucial audience buying is in the current media landscape, especially the idea of singular brand journey on multiple devices? So, the simplest answer is if you're not, if an investor, which is a marketer or an agency or indeed a media owner, is not speaking the vocabulary of audiences, then they are a dinosaur. So they will kind of phase themselves out either on their own volition or the market will phase them out. So, there is no choice about not speaking or indeed delivering audiences. The challenge comes in in trying to make sure that the audiences that are being delivered are in a way monetizable and in a way for that to happen, there should be a clear standards, whether it is measurement or numbers on quantifying data and then the quality of that data. And that's where I believe that when I was very heartened to see, I think Le Ma earlier on saying that it's the omnip channel partner for getting audiences on the investor's radar. And I think that is the kind of, let us say, insights into the market that makes us feel, okay, here's a good way to go forward and that's where I see much of the progress happening. So how do you see the future of DOH and connected screens evolving in India? So I'd like to believe you don't have a choice but to evolve DOH. Now, whether it will evolve in a manner that is federal in nature or national in nature. So in India, everything is federal in nature. So each market, each micro market is going to be doing something which hopefully will delight us, but there will be many instances which will simply horrify us. And I think the anxiety of the things that are likely to cause us horror will be far lesser than the, what, the cliched word is the jugard mindset which is likely to deliver some interesting innovations. I would want to caution us all saying whenever the regulations, standards, and practices are coming in, we should ensure, this is a unique small window we have wherein if we can get the right standards and protocols and let us say measurements in place, it helps capture the value to all legitimate players and it ensures that that entire value that is getting captured and being delivered to the legitimate players, be it the media owner who is investing in the digital assets or indeed the media or the infrastructure owner be it an airport or a metro or a municipality to extract their fair value for it and not be overly swayed by one-off players who come in and make sure and try and muddy the waters with some very, very difficult, so to speak, value propositions. I think we have that unique opportunity here and I hope both the gray hair as well as the steroids around this entire forum will make sure that that kind of capturing and sequestering that value happens. Very crucial point you made. Sherith, I would also like to know what kind of unique advantages do emerging media platforms offer like retail, OH and connected TV? Yes and no. Yes, because I think Laetitia's data showed that, but not just for digital OH, but I think if I'm not mistaken, almost a decade and a half ago, one of the largest, let us say unsung heroes of retail media was in-store radio and I think Walmart had a business division itself which had in-store white label radio and I think that was contributing to almost one and a half or 2% of their annual revenue. And that was always all about brands in Walmart advertising in in-store radio. And so quite naturally to see the evolution of, whether it's in-store radio or in-store static posters, now evolving into in-store DAOH and in-and-around retail outlets DAOH is I think a very logical revolution and it's, this is I think a great example of how a business such as I think QVD has been able to bring in systems, processes and technologies and capture value and therefore deliver back to all the stakeholders be it the marketers who are advertising, be it the agencies which are helping with that recommendation and of course to the shareholder who have the media owner which is the whichever retail outlet is there, they are getting able to sweat out a lot more value from something that was earlier a dead space. That's it. Yeah, our best wishes to the industry I guess and now we would like to have a rapid fire round. Why do people call you shirt team? I know, that's a tough one. I haven't found the answer but if anybody knows it I'm happy to take this. Your favorite OH or DAOH ad? Favorite? Most favorite ad. Oh, favorite OH ad, that's it. Oh, I think the one that really sticks in my mind has been the British Airways one which was done with in UK, in London on the kid chasing the airplane. I think that's probably the most iconic one. How many remarks, Bill Billboards, that you have seen today while on the way to the auditorium? Oh, okay, the good news is I saw quite a few, the bad news is I saw quite a few vacant. So I'm not sure whether it augurs well or not but there is a story that is happening and I am hoping that we're all acutely sensitive to it. Have you watched any movie after spotting an OH ad of the film? I watched a movie, I think more OTT rather than movie. So almost, thanks to I think Netflix, almost my entire viewing of Netflix is determined by what comes on the Billboards and the OH ads. Oh, that's great. And the most humorous person in the OH industry? Most humorous person in the OH industry. Oh, I think every one of the media owners their ability to smile through everything that they are facing is I think the most humorous set of guys you can think of today. Yeah. Thank you so much, Sharad, for giving your time and sharing your valuable views. Thank you.


Okay, I think we're going to go ahead and get started in a couple of minutes after now, but it looks like everybody's gotten a seat. So, good morning. Can everybody in the back hear me okay? Good. Thank you. So, I'm Andrew Salons. I'm the partnerships leader at the Center for Open Science. And today I'm going to talk about improving integrity, transparency, reproducibility through connection of the scientific workflow, or the scholarly workflow. So, what this is going to mostly cover, that's not what I expected there. Okay, there is a first bullet that's not showing up. It shows on here, but not on there. There are three things that I want everybody to take home from this conversation. The first one that you can't see is that this talk is going to be about the open science framework. It's a platform that we build at the Center for Open Science. The first bullet is that this is a free and open source platform. So, it's something that anybody can use. We try to reduce the barriers as much as possible to get in and use it. A second thing is designed to add efficiency to the workflow. So, to make lives of users easier, reduce steps that are involved in doing various tasks. And the third thing, and this is a big important point, is we want to bridge the workflow. We want to connect to lots of other tools and services across the workflow. So, keep these things in mind, including the one that you can't see. And we'll kind of cover various points in there along the way. So, why is this an important thing to be talking about right now? I've got a snapshot of several different news articles that have been out in scholarly communication outlets. I think some from large journals, some from various popular press locations, all talking about different issues in science around reproducibility, around publishing of results that are false, so confirmatory issues in publishing research, power failures talking about sample sizes and power analysis issues. These are a variety of different types of problems that are getting lots and lots of discussion in many areas of science and scholarship more generally. All around published literature, all things that people want to find ways to do something differently to support and improve and everybody's looking for solutions. On one hand, what we're looking to do is address these types of problems. On the other hand, what we're trying to work on are things of barriers and incentives, these kinds of discrepancies that exist. So, one way of thinking about this is norms and counter norms. So, in scholarship or research in general, you might think of these types of norms that are outlined on the left here as being the ideals, the things that we'll want to work on. Open communality, open sharing, universalism, the idea that evaluate research for its own merit, disinterestedness, meaning that you're not necessarily looking for a particular outcome, you're interested in the question and discovery. Organized skepticism, consider all new evidence even against one's own work, so you could discover something and then disprove yourself as a concept. And quality is another point. The counter norms are the alternatives of these things. Secrecy includes as opposed to open, particularism, meaning very focused on particular problems and around reputation. So, are we qualifying this based on somebody's reputation or the merits of the work itself? Self-interestedness, meaning research becomes a competition as opposed to this discovery process. Dogmatism, all about finding and promoting one's own theories and findings rather than trying to consider new evidence and evaluate whether something is valid or not, and quantity versus quality. So, the point with this is these are some of the types of challenges that exist that are drivers and cause conflicts in incentives and generate some barriers around those issues. So, as one way of looking at this, there was a study that was published in 2007. It surveyed 3,247 mid and early career scientists. This was through the NIH funding. And it talked about how people... what sort of ideals people are subscribing to to this norm and counter norm issue. People say that they believe in one thing and then they practice something different, this type of issue. So, the first one up here is looking at... the gray bar that you see on the left is the norm. And this is one's own behavior. So, what do you actually practice? So, you're looking on the left, what do you practice? The norm, everybody says, yeah, I practice the norm. There's a small percentage that do the counter norm. A second point on it is pure behavior. What does everybody else do? The left shifts a little bit further. So, everybody else is practicing the counter norm. And the third thing is shifting even further. So, others' behavior entirely. So, the perception is, I believe in this. I do this. Everybody else does this other thing entirely. Which presents significant problems. Yeah. So, we're up against this type of problem. So, it's somebody else's problem. It's not my problem in practice. And this is a difficult thing to overcome. So, this is some of the context that we're talking about. We've got these sort of practical barriers and issues. They're difficult to overcome. We've got these issues of perception of me versus others. And we're trying to figure out how to address these things. So, just a little bit of context before I get into the actual platform discussion. Some context on our organization and who we are and what we're doing while we're working on these things. COS is the Center for Open Science. We were established last year, 2013. We describe ourselves as a non-profit tech startup. So, we are an independent 501C3. But we operate more like a tech startup. We try and be quick and agile and iterative and all of those things. We began with four leading foundation funders. So, we are grant funded right now. At this point, we're somewhere between $14 and $15 million in startup funding. I didn't have the dollar amount available right now, but we're in that range. We're in Charlottesville, Virginia. Not with the University of Virginia, but nearby. And our team has grown very rapidly over this period as we're trying to build and grow to be able to sustain and support what we're building. We've got about 25 full-time people, about 20 interns at any given time. And an important thing to underscore here is our team is mostly software developers and researchers. So, we bring researchers onto the team to provide expertise in the things that we are trying to build and support. And our mission at the bottom here, as you see, high level goals, mission is to improve openness, integrity, and reproducibility of research. What we are often focusing on is scientific research. But what we think is that this applies to research generally, which is why I'm calling it scholarship today. So, I'm going to go ahead and get right into what the actual tool is and what it provides. This is the URL down at the bottom, osf.io. So, if you're on a computer and you want to follow along on there, feel free. We try and make it very accessible. So, all you have to do is go there and create an account. It's easy, it's free. We describe it here as you see as a project management tool with collaborators sharing. It's a file storage system. It's lots of different things, all of which you'll see some examples of as we go along. But the first thing you have to do is create an account. So, once you do that, you have the opportunity to modify some account settings. You can update your information. We basically have a profile system built into this. So, it can be internal and then representation of your profile within the system.  You can add social media information, employment information, education information. So, you can basically build your profile. And we try and connect this to lots of other similar type tools and services. So, the social section will have your Orchid ID, your Twitter handle, your Facebook page, your LinkedIn page, GitHub ID, all sorts of different things that might be relevant. The next section is your dashboard. So, we approach this as a sort of a dashboard concept. The black bar that you're seeing up at the top, that's your main menu bar. It has my dashboard and then Explorer where you can look at public projects. What you're seeing here is where you would land once you have an account. And there's two main columns here. Project organizer is the left side, which is basically like a file tree. It's a bit more complex than that, but what you can organize is your registrations, your projects. You can use your frequently used list. You can organize it all sorts of different ways that are useful to you. We leave this very flexible and let the user specify how they want to organize things rather than impose some sort of structure on that. On the right side, we have Create a Project. This is a very quick onboarding method. So, basically all you have to do to create a project is type a title of a project in there and this can change later. A description which is optional and a template which is optional. So, if you were to create multiple projects over and over again with the same structure, you could use a template to do that. Say you had a lab and you wanted data collection and data analysis and publications and all of these things to be organized in certain ways. You just use a template to do that. Once you hit Create, it'll create that project and we'll go on to see what that looks like. You would land on this page. So, I have a new project and this new project is pretty bare bones at this point but there's a central menu bar in the middle here. Overview, File as Wiki, Statistics, Registrations, Fourth Sharing Settings. And I'm calling out a number of different features. So, we're on the Overview tab right now which shows you the entire project. You see the project's file tree and that's only for that project. Over here we have the Sharing section in the menu. We have citations. Everything in here gets persistent, unique IDs. And we generate citations automatically for people based on that. Down in the bottom right here you see a log. Every single action in this system is automatically logged for the user. So, it creates a history and tracks provenance, which is very helpful in understanding how research evolved and actually very difficult to do sometimes if you don't have anything like this. The top right on that red box up there is Private and Make Public. And you see that Private is the one that's suppressed right now. The default option on every project is to keep it entirely private. And we never require that it become open. We allow users to operate privately as long as they would like. But we also make it very easy if they want to become open with how they're doing it. So, that can happen at any point in time. So, that's some highlights there. Let's go ahead to the next section. The Wiki. We have a Wiki tool built in here. It's pretty simple at this point, but we're adding a lot of new features to it right now, actually. So, just some highlight points. You can access the Wiki in the menu bar, Wiki history. So, you can click on there and you can see the entire history of changes on the Wiki. So, you can look at differences. And over on the right, you can add new or edit a Wiki page. So, that's the highlight there. The next thing is components. So, again, we do not impose structure. We let users choose how they want to structure their projects. The way that we provide support for that is a thing called components, which could be considered like folders of a project in some ways. So, if you were on a project page here, you would see add component. You could click that. You would get this box over on the right, which says name your component, and choose a category. Some of these categories now and in the future will have certain activities sort of related to them. You know, certain types of rules that could be there. But the default one, the most generic one is project. And you can nest as many of these components under as desired. So, this really gives users the freedom to structure their project however they like to create as many different, you know, branches of the tree as are needed to correctly represent how things relate to each other. Once you complete a component there, you'll see down here, this is the top level, a new project, and data analysis plan would be the component of that project. So, you see it represented that way, and if we were to go back to the top level view, you would see a tree structure at that point. The next thing I want to cover is adding contributors. So, we call users on the system contributors. You could call them collaborators. And what we're talking about here is adding new users to projects and giving those users different types of permissions. So, we have permissions controls. So, all you have to do here is when you're on your menu bar, you find sharing, you do add contributors. You click that button down here. You'll see select from the results. So, I would type some of these names in here. We type Courtney in here. We get the list of results. We choose the plus sign. It adds it over to the right side. We specify permissions. We have read, rewrite, administrator, the main levels of permission. And then you would submit and add that person. So, in this case, this is somebody who is already in the system, but you can also add people who are not in the system already and they'll be sent an invitation by email and they can join that way. So, we basically put all the control of this in the user's hands. One other thing to call out here is, it's probably a little too far away to read right here, but for this particular user, the one that we were calling out, there's additional information below her name. And that information is a product of her profile that she created. So, she will get a richer view, a richer representation of her identity in a contributor list if she's completed her profile or added information to her profile, which helps her differentiation when people have common names. So, that's one thing there. As I mentioned before, privacy is an important thing for us. Despite the fact that we would like people to be open and transparent with their practices, we recognize that that is not the norm right now. So, we try and support people where they are. That's really sort of an underlying philosophy here is don't make people come to us, help us go to people, provide support in the ways that they want right now. So, if you're in the private state right now and you want to make it public, we provide a warning that says, once this project is made public, there's no way to guarantee that access to it, access to the data it contains could be completely prevented. Which means you go public, somebody might access it at that moment. You may go private again, but somebody might have already gotten it. So, we just try and make a very explicit statement there, warning that. Alright, continuing along, another thing here that's obviously of significant importance since this is what most people use is uploading files. People use this as a file storage system. We have unlimited capacity on this right now. I mean, obviously there is a limit, but we do not impose any sort of limit on people. We have not had that abused yet. So, please don't abuse that. But yeah, it's free. And we allow people to put as much stuff in here as they would like. And we want to support that, we're funded to support that. So, we try and make that process extremely easy. If you're looking at your file tree here, there's an actions column. There are two buttons here. In this case, click one of the buttons for the place that you want to upload it. A modal will come up and allow you to pick it from your directory. The alternative is take that file and drag and drop it on here. And we have a drop zone integration, so it will just be added to where you dropped it. So, we try and make that extremely easy for people to use. I mentioned earlier that we do logging. So, every activity in there is logged. Every action from adding a file to adding a contributor to removing a contributor to making a public to making a private, all of these things get recorded in the history of the entire project. And this is whether it's public or private. So, if you had it private and you make it public, everybody can see what was done, which is really important for transparency of process. A second thing that we think is a very high value feature is versioning. So, this is something that is a challenge for a lot of people and often done very manually. So, we try and do it in a more automated way. So, basically, if you took a file and you went and uploaded it, and then you drop a new version of the file in, it will create a version history for you on that. So, down here in the bottom right you see version one. It was submitted by this user at this date. In version two, this user at this date. And on the right, there's zeros, which are the number of times that file has been downloaded, and then download buttons. So, this is nice in the sense that this helps support collaboration and automated versioning. It also helps people with their needs for understanding what sort of impact they're having. They can see how many versions, or how many different downloads have happened on each version. And then above that you get, there's the download button there where you can just download everything at once. So, the next feature and sort of concept I want to introduce here is one that may be less familiar. But this is the concept of registrations. Show of hands in the room. How many people have a sense of what I'm talking about with the registration? Okay. That's what I was expecting. Okay. So, this is something that's increasingly emerging in the space right now. And especially in social sciences and in some life science areas, it's the idea of registering. Well, there's kind of two uses of this. Registering studies before they're done. And this is to avoid changing hypothesis to accommodate outcomes. Right? So, you have a hypothesis. You collect data. You do your analysis. You don't like the analysis you get. And then you say, well, I meant to actually have a different hypothesis to change it. Yeah, that's not really ideal for quality in science. So, a lot of different disciplines are starting to adopt this concept of registration where at the very beginning, you register your claim someplace. You say, I'm going to do this study. This is the question I'm going to ask. This is the protocol, the analysis plan that I have. And when I get to the end, I will have evidence that that was what I was intending to do. And that way, if the results come out in ways that you don't like, that's the result. That's how it is. You can do a different study, but those are the results. So, we provide a registration mechanism to support that. And what this is basically is, on a project, there's registrations up here. You hit the registration, the registration. It provides you with a form here, which there are various templates for. We have an open-ended registration where there are several text boxes to complete. A user types in whatever is required for those boxes. And then it creates this copy over here. And you can't see it very easily, but there's a bar mark behind this that says Read Only. And this is a frozen copy. So the whole point with the registration is that you can't change it after you do it. Otherwise, that would defeat the entire purpose. So it's a completely frozen set of copy of the project at that point in time. And then, when you get to the end of the project, you can refer back to that and have evidence that that was the intention. We also use this in another way in that people can create a registration at any time in their project.  If you just want to see easily where the project was at that point in time, that would be a case for creating a registration. So people do use it that way sometimes. These are, as I said, these are increasing in use. A number of journals are requiring these. There actually are changes in some journal practices shifting towards this type of thing as a priority for actual review and acceptance. So, yeah. So it's increasing in awareness and popularity and usage. So the next thing, sharing work. So I mentioned earlier the adding contributors and the ability to control permissions and things like that. A different dimension of this is sharing in a private way. So say that I do not want to add somebody as a contributor which would elevate them to the status of collaborator. They're not really a collaborator. They just are somebody who needs to see my stuff and they need to see it when it's private. Perhaps a peer reviewer, perhaps a funding reviewer. What you would do is create a view-only link. Create a link. Pulls up this box over here where you get to generate a new link to share a project. You can name what that is. You can describe it as a peer review. You can choose to make it anonymous if you want. If you make it anonymous, it wipes all of the information in the log history and everywhere on the page. Everyone on the project, any identities. So it is not going to the file level and wiping identities out of files. That's obviously a risk. But at the level of contributors and versions and history log and all of that, it is wiping identities often showing as anonymous. So this can be extremely helpful for peer review and anonymous peer review in particular, or blind peer review. The second aspect of it is you can choose which parts of the project you want to share in that capacity. So you can just choose particular components where you can choose the entire project. And I guess the last important point on this is you can expire these links. That's a critical thing, right? You might have a several month period where you want somebody to have access and then you don't want them to have access anymore. So you would go in and delete that access level. A critical topic to bring up in here, of course, is unique and permanent IDs. So our philosophy, and I think a shared philosophy in here would be that scientific content must be easy to site and annotate. Without being able to consistently get to something, it simply is not going to be as reliable. So right now our strategy is we have GUIDs that we generated for this. We are exploring other options, whether we go with DUIs or easy IDs or any sort of different types of persistent identifiers. But right now we have our own local GUIDs that we generate. They look like these. OSF IO and then five characters. And these are randomly generated characters. We do not let people specify their own set of characters to know vanity URLs right now. And my point with this is these are three different types of things entirely that all have similar types of persistent IDs. This one is a project. This one is somebody's profile. So is that individual's profile? And the third thing is a file. So in all cases there's persistent access to many different parts of the open science framework and somebody's experience in there. All right. So a third thing that I mentioned at the beginning that's important for everybody to take away here is we are trying to connect the workflow. So I just talked about all internal features and I'll talk a little bit about external. We have add-ons. So our model is we have an API. Other tools and services have APIs. We want those APIs to connect. And we want to bring value to our users in our service as well as users and product owners of other services. So right now these are the five that we have in production. Dropbox, GitHub, Dataverse, FakeShare, Amazon S3. If you're not familiar with these, Dropbox is for general file storage, GitHub for code, Dataverse. I imagine a lot of people in here are familiar with Dataverse, but Social Science Data Repository largely. FakeShare, a general purpose repository mostly or at least begun for figures. Amazon S3, a general purpose industry data storage service. So we chose these mostly because they had very accessible APIs and they had a fair amount of usage in certain areas of our user groups right now. So what happens here is when you're in a project and you're looking at your menu bar, there's an option for settings up on the right. You go to the settings. It provides you a selection of add-ons that are available. We have three categories right now, documentation, storage, and other. The storage section shows the five or six add-ons that we have. The other one that's on there is not an option, actually. It's always self-storage. It's internal storage. You choose the one that you want to add and then down here it lets you configure that. So we do this via tokens. So we do not keep credentials. We're using the tokens. And once you do that, you assign it to a project. You pick a folder or whatever the appropriate structure is within the other service. That becomes available on this project. So the value that this adds is if I have a team that is using the OSF, but I happen to be the only one on the team that uses GitHub, nobody else has GitHub IDs. Nobody else wants to have GitHub IDs. But everybody else wants to be sure that they can see the things that are in there, even if it's private. I can authenticate my GitHub account with our project and then everybody on the team can interact with that GitHub account. That GitHub repo through the OSF and the opposite. So we do bidirectional as much as possible. So I could add something to GitHub. It would show up here. I could add it to here. It would show up in GitHub. And that's true for pretty much all of these add-ons. And that will be the idea for most add-ons going forward. So these are all storage, but we want to do a whole lot more than that. And as I said, connecting the workflows is the philosophy here. So some other examples of things to kind of illustrate what we mean by across the workflow. DMP tool. This is a service that was created to help researchers produce data management plans that are compliant with requirements from funders or from other organizations. So the idea here is that service right now ends at the creation of a DMP. So somebody goes in. They see the requirements. They complete various questions. They get a DMP out. They submit that DMP to a funder and end of story. What we want to do is take that plan and shift it into the OSF and make it an active living document, something that people can use as a guide to actually creating their entire project, which ideally is a starting point for the project. So we think that that would be a good addition for people. A second thing is Databib. Databib already three data. Basically both being a catalog of repositories of data repositories. And the idea in this case would be to provide a data repository lookup service so somebody is managing their data in the OSF. They get toward the end of their projects and a journal or funder requirement says that they have to now deposit that data someplace else. Where do they deposit it? They don't know. So the idea would be to have Databib and RE3 data be the lookup service that provides suggestions based on the type of data, the type of discipline, various criteria. And then the thing that we'd like to extend on that is adding a checklist. So this repository that you've been suggested has these requirements in order to do deposit in that repository. It accepts these types of formats, these types of files, the size. They requires these different metadata fields, those kinds of things to basically help researchers transition from where they are with how they're working with it to a state of deposit, which we know is a major hurdle for people. A third thing, and this is similar to the other storage services but more preservation oriented, is Databrary. So Databrary already does sensitive video storage very well. They're doing lots of video on different types of interactions with participants and studies. It's a hard problem. It's a problem that we do not want to solve, but we want to help other people access that feature. So we would connect to their service if you were in the OSF and you had appropriate rights in their environment, then you would be able to access both things from that, in that case. Okay, so that's the end of Connections for right now. So I just want to show a couple of different use cases from real people so that you see kind of what we're talking about in more detail. So this is a real user. This is Erica. She's a PhD student at UC Riverside in Psychology. So she, full disclosure here, she worked with us as an intern for a semester, so she got fully on board with this process. In that environment. But the really positive thing is, as she was working with us, she worked as a developer with us, even though she's a psychology grad student. She came and worked with us. She saw the value that this could bring to what she does, and she took it back and her entire lab adopted this. She's not in charge of the lab, but her lab believed that this was something that would significantly improve how they were working on things. So the tools that they use day to day, these are not things that we support entirely right now, but Qualtrics, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey, and R. We have Dropbox now. We actually do have an R library where you can be an R and access public data in the OSF. So you could call data from the OSF and do analysis in R. Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey are things that we'd like to support in the future. As far as the features that she said brought the most value to what they're doing are things like version control, collaboration, a wiki, the wiki they use for all their lab notebook and meeting documentation. So when they have their weekly lab meeting, they're recording things in their wiki for their project in the OSF, and it's just helped with sort of consolidation of all of these things. A second case, and this is a fair bit different. This is a, Rodrigo is a researcher in bioinformatics down in Mexico City. They have lots of different types of genetic data. So they use things like next-gen sequencers, pipelining software. They write a lot of their own software. So they've got the problem of how does everybody in their team make sure they continue to have access to the software and different parts of things that they have in their project. So the things that they felt were extremely useful for them were version control, file sharing, the GitHub and Dropbox integration, and then public sharing. They really wanted to be able to make this consolidated view of their work public and visible. They do this in a gradual way. They're not making everything instantly visible, but they wanted to be able to make it more easily visible as it's represented across multiple services. A third one that some people in here may be familiar with because of Norm is, oh, except in the classroom. So this is Project Tier, which is at Havertford College, and I think they've presented here before, actually. The problem that they're trying to solve is how do you teach undergrads how to make research reproducible and verifiable? They've got that. They've got some various programs that they do, workshops and things that try and teach those different techniques, and at least helping people be aware and thinking about these problems. So they find the OSF to be extremely useful for organization of documents and data, the command files, as people are writing these and needing to know how they're doing the analysis of what they're doing, the metadata, so being able to describe the parts of what they have and the file sharing generally, basically across the team and across classroom groups. So those are a couple of examples. There are a lot of other use cases that we have, but these are some of the more prominent common uses. So I think I promised this in the billing, so I thought I would put this up a little bit. If you're interested in this, this is how this is built. I'm not a developer on the team, so I'm not going to go into a lot of depth on this, but our CTO is here at the meeting. He presented yesterday, and he could certainly talk about more things if you're interested. But we are a Python shop. It's all Python, JavaScript. We use Git to do the versioning within. We use MongoDB, TACU, MX for the database structure, or the NoSQL database. We use Ansible for automation of the entire process. Elastic Search is what we're using for the indexing. I put OSF API, because that actually is an important part of our infrastructure. We have an API that we use ourselves. So the core infrastructure interacts with the top-level infrastructure through our own API, and other services will obviously be able to interact that way as well. We use Rackspace for storage and line node for hosting. So that's what the environment looks like right now. So just to close out and provide context on how this stuff connects to some other things also, if you're interested in what we're doing, if you're interested in collaborating or getting involved, this is what Share is built on. You made it for that yesterday, or in other venues, but OSF is the infrastructure to support Share. So one way that you could contribute is to be able to add content into Share and partner on curation of content. That's sort of a future direction that we'll have lots of discussion about, I'm sure. A second thing that we're just getting started is serving as an ambassador. So we're going to start an ambassador program. So these types of use cases can be shared at various institutions so that more people know about this and more people can choose whether this works for them or not. A third thing that some people in the room may have already heard about is that as a compliment to this service and to try and help support these broader goals, we are funded to provide training and consulting on reproducible and open practices, reproducible statistics and open practices. So basically we go around and we give workshops, training sessions, we have conversations with lots of people about how to make statistics more reproducible and the entire process more transparent. The use of the OSF to support these things. We've got workshops in the next few months set up at Princeton, Yale, Duke, a whole series of places that I'm blanking on the entire list of right now. But we would love to offer these in more places. So if this is of interest to you, I'd love to talk about that. We usually do it through libraries as much as we can. Libraries as neutral places that are not solely interested in departmental activities. So, yeah. And the last thing, we are always hiring. So if you or anybody else would be interested in working on these types of activities, please see our jobs page and please encourage people to apply. It's a very active growing environment and it's exciting to be sort of part of this. So we'd love to have more people join. If you have questions, I'd be happy to take questions now, but if you have things later, these are the places to contact us. Contact at OSFIO or Twitter is OSF Framework. And we'd love to talk more. So thank you very much for listening and I'd be happy to take any questions.