Hello YouTube, I'm Asperger's growth and today we'll talk about seven ways in which Asperger's makes it hard to communicate with people. This is a really important video to watch if you want to understand autistic people a whole lot better so make sure you give it a like and share it to as many people as possible or to anybody who you might think will benefit from this video. Before I get into the video I just want to ask you to hit the like button make sure to subscribe it's just a tiny little thing that you can do that will make a whole big difference in how this channel goes about so without further ado here's seven ways in which Asperger's makes it hard to communicate. Number one the understanding of ourselves is very limited the logic communication and emotional part of our brains don't communicate very well with each other so this means that it takes a lot of effort to translate our emotions into a logical understanding and this logical understanding into speech that can kind of get on the wavelength of other people that we're trying to communicate this to. Number two social mimicking and passing as we grow up we get a lot of lead behavior from being around people at school being around people in family so this means that we mimic a lot of the communicative ways that people go about although this is a good thing in order to make friends and in order to go about your daily life and get jobs and stuff like that it also doesn't translate well to how our brains work it also reduces people's perceptions of how much our autism may actually realistically affect us it's usually viewed as something that doesn't have a very large impact on our personality and the way that we think but in reality it does have a massive impact on how we perceive things and also how we act. By passing as a neurotypical person it means that a lot of the compromises that we may want people to make in order to make us feel better in social situations or just to understand us in a better way are usually ignored and if it isn't taken as seriously it won't be factored into other situations such as relationships or friendships such as the differences in our ability to portray what we mean and also our ability to get an idea of what someone's trying to tell us through the body language and facial expressions and tone of voice that are usually used to convey a certain idea to a neurotypical person as you can see we can get very confused about these things i would prefer a more direct and logical approach to communicating a lot of people with autism who want to be better at being in social situations want to get girlfriends anything like that will do a lot of looking at people and observing people and seeing how they react to certain situations so that we know how we should react in certain situations to get to know people but we do lack the innate social abilities that people who don't have autism have to put it this way a neurotypical person has a conscious and subconscious mind and a lot of the sensory information from a conversation such as the tone of voice the body language and the facial expressions feed into the subconscious mind which ultimately affects how they communicate with another person being people with autism or aspergers the understanding of these things have to be learned and often get mixed up and confused even if we learn how to understand people's body expressions facial expressions tone of voice in a social context to a degree that's as well as a neurotypical person it requires a lot of brain power because we need to think about all these things and in a lot of certain situations there can be a lot of sensory environmental factors that come in and it can lead us to feel very exhausted trying to communicate someone with someone the problem comes in when we try to relax and we're very at ease with other people we tend to focus less on the body language and tone and this can lead to us getting a wrong idea of a situation or receiving a message that is opposite or different to what the person intended it to be you may have friends with aspergers who may take regular breaks from social situations that maybe just go to the bathroom for a bit or maybe just say that they want to they want to go home because of some other reason but this is basically just to alleviate all the pressure and all the anxiety from trying to decode this this language that neurotypical people generally have a very easy time of doing in their subconscious because we need to do it in our in our conscious minds it's very difficult and even if we do it very well it's very exhausting and can take a lot of a lot of mental power to do number four social anxiety and generalized anxiety are much more prevalent in people with autism or asperger syndrome the anxiety can further be increased by the different ways that our sensory systems are put together so for example we may be exposed to a lot of sensory overload in public places and we may be very feel very adverse feelings to certain sensory stimulation like loud music or anything like that sensory overload occurs when there are a lot of small and large stimuli happening at the same time our conscious mind can't distinguish between things that we need to concentrate on and things that are a background noise and our brain can just shunt off and ignore for the the length of the conversation obviously with a lot of practice we are able to do social do social situations in a environment which is quite busy and stuff but after a while all of that mental strain from having to decode like people's social meanings with body language and stuff as well as ignoring this these other social these other environmental stimuli and it can lead us to be very exhausted and sometimes it may even cause panic attacks we can easily be distracted during conversations and some people may interpret it as being having a lack of interest in someone or have a lack of interest in what they're saying and generally just disengage from the conversation which may make me feel like we're rude or we don't care about them number five unusual or confusing body language or facial expressions as i said before in the other points it takes a lot of mental energy in order to decode the body language tone of voice from other people and also to ignore the sensory overload that comes from the environment when all of these things are happening our focus may not be on ourselves and maybe on trying to read the other person so a lot of the time our tone of voice or facial expressions or body language can be very disjointed with what we're trying to get across or what we're talking about number six social concepts and social rules social concepts and rules are something that autistic people and people of asperger's syndrome may be quite familiar with but may not fully understand an example of this is when to progress a conversation into another topic i know one of my friends with asperger's who with me find it very easy to talk to because they can jump from one topic to a completely different topic without you know any kind of phasing in of like topics and stuff but when they're trying to communicate with other people people will be very confused at why the the the topics changed or they may find it quite rude that they've interrupted them in something or may find it quite rude that they've interrupted them in something that they wanted to talk about another thing is knowing when it's your time to speak we have to spend a lot of time and listening to the conversation listening to the tone of voice and so that we know when it's our time to speak and input on this situation it's a little bit easier when there's only two people in the conversation when there's group conversations we tend to just either ignore them um because we don't know when when we're supposed to put input into the conversation or we'll talk too much in the conversation and interrupt people and it will just be all kind of crazy social mess this may lead people to think we're quite rude and obnoxious with our opinions and maybe not being able to let other people have input in the conversation may make them think we're kind of selfish but it's it's generally just because we don't really understand how we're supposed to go about these group conversations the last concept to look at would be the difference between friendships and relationships for me apart from the obviously physical intimacy i find that very hard to distinguish what makes a relationship and what makes a friendship so in my mind i don't really know how to distinguish a very emotionally connected friend from a romantic partner so it may make it very very difficult for me to understand those concepts i know in my childhood i found it very hard to deal with those kind of things and it led to a lot of strains on the relationships that i was having and also some complications with some friendships that i was having as well it also means that i'm very unlikely to understand when someone's interested in me and and may also think that someone's interested in me when they are actually not at all number seven we live in a society that is built for neurotypical people and not for artistic people from an early age with psychologists and parents and teachers we learn a way of interacting thinking and going about life in a way that we feel is very alien to who we really are the only way that i can really describe it is if you have to put a really patriotic american into a japanese society and expecting to understand all the social cultures and stuff and how to interact with people and also the general kind of emotional vibe that people give off it takes a lot of time but over over the amount of time all these behaviors and teaching how to act like a neurotypical person leads us to be able to pass passing as a neurotypical person this is almost like a outer shell of person around us and it is very contrary to how we would naturally act in in situations and also how we would not act in social situations as well although this can be very beneficial in for getting jobs like in interviews getting friends and getting relationships and we start to really understand why is that way and it can also make us feel like we're not acting how we truly are and make us very self-conscious and upset because we want to act a certain way and we can't all we want to act a certain way but we're very anxious and scared about people's judgments of us this barrier can prevent a lot of autistic people from connecting with other people because we have this outer layer of other person that surrounds us people don't get an idea of what we're really about a lot of the time and it can lead us to making friendships with people who are very contrary to how we really are inside being around these people on completely different wavelengths can lead to um wanting to be isolated can lead to loneliness and depression which um personally I have had trying to uh grow up and make friends in school if you know someone who is autistic or is on an autistic spectrum I recommend you try to uh push them and try to talk about themselves um nine out of ten times you'll find that there's a whole lot beneath the surface that you didn't really realize in the person and it may help you to develop your friendship and get more of emotional connection which will make both of you a lot happier you'll see a lot of unique perspectives on certain things that may make you admire and understand the person even more thank you very much for watching this video this video contains a lot of insights and important things to consider about autistic people and these are a lot of things that a lot of autistic people may want you to know but may not have the um confidence or the ability to communicate what they really want with a better with a better understanding of how an autistic person works and how an autistic person communicates um you can improve their lives and you can also have benefits for you and and also make you you too a lot closer so remember to like and subscribe if you like the video and if you want to see some more content from me and make sure to click the little bell in the corner and that'll give you notifications when my videos come out I don't do them that often so you want to get all the juicy content that comes out when it does so thank you very much for watching that again and I hope you guys are having a great day


Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Putnam, Operations Manager, and I am your Master of Ceremonies this morning. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the Small Market and Stand-alone Military Medical Treatment Facility Organization Change of Directorship Ceremony. The host for today's ceremony is Lieutenant Ronald J. Place, Defense Health Agency Director. Today, you will witness a time-honored tradition as Major General Shana Wojak relinquishes her authority as the Defense Health Agency Small Market and Stand-alone Military Medical Treatment Facility Organization Director to be your General E. D. McCombs. D. McCombs. Please stand for the arrival of the official party and remain standing for the playing of our national anthem and the invocation delivered by Chetlin D. Dean Acres. Here are our nation's colors and pray for your blessing on our leaders and on this change of directorship ceremony of the Small Market and Stand-alone Military Medical Treatment Facility Organization. Like in life, change is to better our lives, but it is a process. We ask that this change lead to provided strategic primary care in the resiliency of our warriors, civilians, and their families. Specifically, we pray for Major General Wojak as she relinquishes this directorship and bring your dear General Cox as he assumes it. Please be with their spouses, Curt and Kathy, as they have been and are becoming a part of this SSO family. We ask for your blessing to continue to bless our service members, their families, and our nation. In your holy name we pray. Amen. Ladies and gentlemen, please be seated. Please join us in recognizing some special guests and attendants today. Command Sergeant Major Michael Gregg, Senior Enlisted Leader Defense Health Agency. Major General Shana Wojak, Director, Small Market and Stand-alone Military Medical Treatment Facility Organization, and her husband, Mr. Kurt Wojak. Chief Master Sergeant Paul A. Ellis, Senior Enlisted Advisor, Small Market and Stand-alone Military Medical Treatment Facility Organization. Brigadier General E. Darren Cox, Deputy Director, Small Market and Stand-alone Military Medical Treatment Facility Organization, and Commanding General Medical Readiness Command West, and his wife, Dr. Kathleen Cox. Command Sergeant Major Timothy J. Sprunger, United States Army Command Sergeant Major for Medical Readiness Command West. Dr. Brian C. Lyne, Defense Health Agency Assistant Director, Healthcare Administration. Sergeant Major Irvin Fantroy, Senior Enlisted Leader, Healthcare Administration, Defense Health Agency. Brigadier General Robert K. Bogart, Air Force Air Combat Command, Surgeon General. Rear Admiral Matthew Case, Tidewalker Market Director, Naval Medical Forces Atlantic Commander. Brigadier General Deidre S. Tehan, Commanding General, Brook Army Medical Center, excuse me, San Antonio Deputy Market Director. Chief Master Sergeant Kenya Williams, Air Force Chief Medical Enlisted Force Development, and other distinguished guests, including MTF directors, senior enlisted leaders, and our community and government partners. Thank you for your attendance. The Defense Health Agency was established on October 1, 2013 as a combat support agency, serving the combatant commanders in the military departments with a stated mission of managing common health care services across the Department of Defense. In December 2016, the Defense Health Agency's responsibilities were expanded by federal law and the Secretary of Defense to include responsibility for directly managing military medical treatment facilities and synchronizing health care delivery in military communities and markets. This responsibility includes integrating the delivery of better health care to active duty service members and military families in both military medical treatment facilities and in the civilian community. It also includes the responsibility of standardizing health care delivery processes across the military health care system, the small market and standalone military medical treatment facility organization, and intermediate management organization is responsible for providing health care delivery to an eligible population of 240,000 Army, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force beneficiaries across 32 states in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Altogether, the small market and standalone military medical treatment facility organization consists of 17 small markets and 41 standalone military medical treatment facilities with an annual budget of $2.5 billion. Today's event is an historic milestone. This ceremony marks the first change of directorship since the official establishment of the Defense Health Agency's small market and standalone military medical treatment facility organization. At this time, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our host for today's ceremony, the director of the Defense Health Agency, Lieutenant General Ronald Place. Thanks, Colonel Putnam, and good morning, everyone. A special thanks, really, to Curt and Kathy, recognize what this means for both of your families. Both today is a ceremonial day, but really, the investment of your families writ large in all that you have done for between the two of them. I'm not going to say how many decades, but decades and decades and decades and your support for them shouldn't go unnoticed by all of us. So thanks for being here. Flag officers, senior listed leaders, ladies and gentlemen, friends and family, good morning to all of you. I'm really honored to be with you here in person and for those who are joining virtually. Thanks for tuning in, because there's really a lot to celebrate today. Just under a year ago, in a building not that far from here, I was in San Antonio helping Major General Wojac celebrate the establishment of the small market and standalone military treatment facility organization, better known as the SSO. Now, that moment was a true milestone, at least I believe so, in military health care. But today, what we're celebrating is what the SSO has become. Small, but mighty. The mission of the SSO is as complex as its full name is long. And consider that the largest of our direct reporting markets and General Wojac and I both know what that's like, because we were both there, but the largest of our direct reporting markets is less than 35 MTS. The SSO, when you count all the child demuses, in particular for the hospitals, 140 MTS. The depth and breadth is just staggering. The SSO accounts for just over a quarter of all healthcare encounters in the military health system. And the team that leads the SSO is diverse and dispersed. In fact, the original staff came from MTFs all across the United States and one staff from Cuba, offering their diversity of perspectives, diversity of experiences, and diversity of talent, often unborrowed time. So what the SSO team accomplished in less than one year is truly nothing short of spectacular. It boggles the mind, in fact. The drive necessary to make the SSO come alive was exemplified by its first leader, Major General Shadow Wojac. Now, based upon the limited details that I've just mentioned, I think that we can all agree that we couldn't pick just anybody for the job. It's a nuanced mission, and frankly, it's innovative. And the additional challenge of moving forward with an organization like the SSO in the operative environment, not the test environment, is that, for the most part, it couldn't fail in that initial rollout. The innovation came at a time when change was required. And it had to be carried out without any deviation from the great outcomes and the readiness those outcomes afford to our country. So during the thick of the MHS transformation, the design of the SSO was one of the most contentious and complicated tasks. And anyone who participated in the work that happened in the greater DC area knows just what I'm talking about. And unlike the relatively tidy construct of large markets, the entities that are part of the SSO started with more distinctions than they did cohesions. Yet somehow, the SSO still needed to ensure the benefits of standardization and integration that the market construct was designed to deliver. Our big promise with markets was to improve the delivery of coordinated health care. Not only to deliver on our main mission, that being readiness that we all support, but also because we know, as medical professionals, that standardization and integration makes care much better for our patients. And it makes transitions easier for our patients and for our staff. Shan, of all people, you knew this was no small task. To vastly oversimplify, you were asked to follow your superb leadership of the national capital market with a very different, yet similarly, can't fail mission. You are entrusted to demonstrate a new way of operating military health care in uncharted territory. Through your leadership, you've demonstrated the success of the SSO model, operationally and culturally. Today, the SSO has headed the game in the military health system pursuit to live and breathe high reliability. And that doesn't happen by accident. We're not watching what your team did to move HRO principles and put them into action. The SSO, unlike a lot of places in the military, had no history to rely on. No set tradition, no existing culture, and certainly no established formulas for success as a teaming organization. It is by design an amalgam of so many histories, so many traditions, and so many different perspectives. But rather than fight those challenges, you embrace them as an asset. The relationships you've built with MTF directors, installation commands, and external partners is what will fuel the SSO for years to come. Whether intentional or not, every one of our directors who is the first to lead in this new model becomes an emblem of what integrated leadership can look like for military health care. They establish the initial benchmark and set the tone for the culture. Shenier contributions to the SSO proved its concept and demonstrated the values that a more integrated military health system can bring. High quality, high reliable integrated care in a complex system of military medical facilities. I'm personally grateful that you accepted the job and you did it all under a microscope, starting with the borrowed staff, during a pandemic with evolving and growing threats around the world. All of us should recognize the enormity of that accomplishment. So, Shannon, thanks for making this leadership opportunity so successful for military health care and for the SSO team, and for really living the vision to improve our system of care. At the pinnacle of an already superb career, you played a significant role in this chapter of change for military medicine. As you turn the page to your very near retirement, we wish you great health, great happiness, and continued success in all that you and Kurt choose to do. Breeder General Darren Cox, congratulations and welcome. As deputy director at the SSO, you've had a front row seat in this innovative organization for the last few months, and I know that we couldn't leave the organization in better hands. I know you'll build upon the legacy of Major General Wojak and the Defense Health Agency as an entity is here to support you and your team. To everyone gathered here today, thanks again for allowing me the opportunity to celebrate with you. God bless all of you, along with the staff and patients of the SSO. God bless our service members deployed in harm's way, and God bless America. We will now execute the change of directorship. The very soul of a military unit is symbolized by the colors under which it fights, for it records the colors of the past, stands as a guardian over its present destiny, and ensures inspiration for its future. History dictates that the color party leads the unit into battle. Instructions given to the color bears historically state when in action resolve not part with the colors, but instead with your life. The colors serve as a proud emblem of our history, and the ceremonial passing of the colors signifies the transferring of authority and responsibility from one director to another. Senior enlisted personnel are traditionally the keeper of the colors. Chief Master Sergeant Ellis, the senior enlisted advisor for the small market and standalone military medical treatment facility organization passes the colors to Major General Wojcik for the last time, thus relinquishing responsibility of the colors. Major General Wojcik passes the colors to Lieutenant General Place, symbolizing that her duties are now complete as the small market and standalone military medical treatment facility organization director. Lieutenant General Place passes the colors to the incoming director, Brigadier General Cox, thus signifying the assumption of duties, responsibility, and authority as director, small market and standalone military medical treatment facility organization defense health agency. By authority of the director, the defense health agency, the undersigned responsibilities as director, small market, and standalone military medical treatment facility organization, defense health agency, effective 29 September, 2022, signed Lieutenant General Ronald Place. The senior enlisted advisor returns the colors to the display of colors, thus assuming responsibility for the flag that represents fellow service members. Ladies and gentlemen, Major General Shana M. Wojcik. General Place, bear with me, just you just got a few more minutes with me, that's all. How's everybody doing? General Place, thank you. I thank you, everyone, for being here today. Can you see me okay? I could get on the stool, but I'm very, if I fall off of it, that will, we're live streaming, I think, so I don't want to fall off the stool. It's interesting, I was telling Kurt last night that I started here 36 years ago, and this is a full circle story. I started here 36 years ago over at Lackland. I actually graduated basic training. They let me graduate. I could walk and chew gum and salute, and I'm ending my career here, too, so I couldn't be happier. You guys know that General Place just said it. We were certified nearly just a year ago next week, actually. When I got here, it was definitely Wojcik party of one. I went over here to Kelly, and I think Mr. Hess let me in the front door, and things kind of took off from there. General Place, I really don't, I know it's a big footprint, but I really didn't feel that over this last year as much as it sounds large, but it's really been a fun experience. Very challenging, but a great experience. I enjoy working with the MTS. I enjoyed putting the staff together. I just enjoyed putting policies, communication, developing a number of communications and operations, and it was so much fun to me to learn the various MTS. You're around for 36 years, and you think you know all of these facilities, and then you learn the Space Force, and right when you learn Space Force, they change all the names, and they call it something different, and then I learned a lot about the Army, and I learned the cultures of the Navy, things I had no idea existed in my 36 years, and then in the midst of putting this office together, we were also doing MHS Genesis across our footprint, and all of us were in various stages of MHS Genesis, and then you throw in some realignment of personnel and property, and then some email conversions, and oh by the way, we have some very, very old buildings in our footprint. So if it isn't an HVAC, a fire panel, or something burning down or blowing up, Dr. Lyon knows it's an exciting infrastructure that we have in aging, and then at the same time, trying to put an office here together that didn't previously exist, and we didn't know exactly what it would look like, and like General Place said, everyone had an opinion, and everyone definitely had a perspective of what it should be. Is it 600, 500, or is it in my case less than 50? You pick that FTE number. What does it take to take care of this many facilities? And we're still in the midst of figuring that out. We still don't know that we've got the right number, but we're getting there. We don't know exactly what right looks like, but we're getting there. And at the time, we really didn't know what our demand signal was. So not only putting this together, but typically you go on historical information. You go on historical data, year over year and what it takes, and we just really didn't know that. And again, a lot of folks had a lot of opinions on what they thought it was. And then of course I would welcome them to come to San Antonio and show me, because it was ever-evolving. I wanna take the time to really, first, thank you everyone that put this event together. This looks fantastic. This is a new space for us. It's a new building, if you haven't guessed already. And this is a DHA conference area, so this was no small feat putting this together. So Commander Sammons and the entire group that did this, thank you. It really did a fantastic job. But I know we have several MTF directors here today. And I really, really want to applaud you, what you do and you too have been in the midst of change. You have, this is in my opinion, you have been very patient. You've been very flexible. You've been very amenable to adapt and overcome to this new environment that you're in also. And at the same time, running your MTFs. And I just wanna encourage you just to stay focused on the fact that we're gonna keep changing. This footprint could even change and the MHS will change over a period of years. But I wanna encourage you to continue to focus on your organizations on that high reliable care and those outcomes. And I just wanna say thank you from the bottom of my heart for working with me. And it's truly been a pleasure. And I understand your job is not easy and we're not making it easier even going into this next year. But I really wanted to say thank you to the MTF leaders that you just knock it out of the park every time. But so appreciative and so appreciative you worked with me this last year as well. To the SSO staff is interesting. You know, when you interview folks for a job, you really don't, it's hard to really get them oriented to this isn't a turnkey organization. It's never existed before. So if you're a person coming into an organization that's not comfortable without a manual or a checklist or a way to do something, this may not be your place. This may not be your place. And so we're bringing employees in and really explaining this isn't turnkey. We were truly building the plane in flight. And I think we're still building the plane. And then I try to be joint service but I know we build the ship at sea. And so Kurt and I were trying to think what's the army analogy of doing something in motion? We couldn't figure that out. Is it a tank or something like that? I stuck with planes because Kurt's a pilot. I just felt that was the right thing to say. But I know with the SSO staff there's been days of frustration, days of confusion. And we could all agree that we have moved very, very quickly. We've moved very quickly. And I think I really got a lot of you out of your comfort zones. And that's fun to me. It's fun to get out of my comfort zone. And I know that I've done that to the staff here. And that we keep changing nearly on a daily basis. But I want you to remember, you've been part of something great. You've been part of something bigger than yourselves. And I always want you to focus why are we here and what are we doing? And if you keep that focus that you're doing something larger than yourselves, I think that constant ebb of change will feel a lot better. But you are responsible for so many successes that we've had here. And we've had many. We just finished our year-end review. And I think that it's really, it's nice to look back to really see what you've accomplished in this last year. So I encourage all of you to read that and take a look at it. Because really the successes have been many. And so for those in the SSO staff, those that came in with the motivation, the energy, the willingness to roll your sleeves up, for those of you that came in with a great attitude and a positive spirit, for those of you that came to the workplace to be accountable, to inspire a culture of engagement, diversity of thought, and for building others up. For those of you that came to this organization to make a real difference, not just for yourselves, but for the greater good for a much larger purpose. I thank you. Thank you to all of those that did that. So appreciative. And I also, especially when I think of Mr. Stringer, I don't know where he is. He's got to be somewhere close and in chief. And I couldn't have done this. You've been my day-to-day foundation and strength and purpose as well. So I want to say especially thank you to you too. Dr. Lyon. Dr. Lyon, I think everybody knows Dr. Lyon. I want to say, sir, thank you for your support, your guidance. You're an incredible example for other leaders to follow. You share a passion like I do. You move quick like I do and fast and on the go.  And it's our MTFs. It's our soldier, sailors, and airmen and our patients. And you really do set the bar pretty high. So sir, thank you for all that you've done. You have passion. Captain Farrell. Captain Farrell is our behind the scenes. If you haven't noticed, she just kind of pops out of nowhere and things just happen. She's been doing this back in Falls Church now. I've known her for a few years and I was working with her pretty closely in the NCR. She's behind the scenes constantly making things happen, not just with the SSO. I mean, every day that there was something to fix, something broke or I needed something, you can always rely on her to connect the dots, connect the relationships and get things moving when you couldn't physically do it here in San Antonio. And I know Captain Farrell, you have worked diligently, not only just with the SSO, but with all of the direct reporting markets, getting them transitioned as well as the DHARS. And I know that I couldn't have done this job without you. So thank you. Thank you so much.  So she finds resources and they just appear in San Antonio. You've sent Mrs. Scoffrey down. It's just been a huge asset to the SSO and Ms. Julian and just the multiple folks that have come down to help us grow and help us evolve. So thank you, Captain Farrell. There's a couple of folks not here today, but I'm gonna, I'll have to say it anyway, Mr. Flanders. And I think a lot of you know Mr. Flanders, he was really my day one person when we showed up at the building. You know, we didn't have computers. We, you know, I know a lot of the SSO staff that got here earlier. We didn't have computers, we didn't have phones. There's a lot of things that we just take for granted. And Mr. Flanders, as usual, sees a larger picture. Again, just a phone call and just helping us get operational. Even at that level, it was just great to see. And Mr. Flanders also sees a larger picture and not just his own real estate. I really, truly couldn't have done that without him. I wish Mr. Goodman was here. Ms. Clude, you're gonna have to pass this on. You all know, if you met, everybody know Mr. Goodman for a show of hands, we can all, yeah. The MCF director's like, oh yeah, we know Mr. Goodman. He aspires to be his alter ego. And I think we can all agree his alter ego is the Grinch. And, but this just isn't true about Mr. Goodman. He too is very passionate. He too cares deeply about what we're trying to accomplish in the military health system. He cares passionately about our successes at all levels. And if it wasn't Mr. Goodman, again, just a phone call away for a resource, a need, and he too always saw the larger picture. He's responsible for us being in this building today. And again, a problem solver and one of those individuals that understands the needs and the resources required to execute a mission. I wanna thank the Air Force, and this is in no particular order, so nobody get offended. The Air Force Navy and the Army. Or we can go Army, Navy Air Force, Navy, Army Air Force. So there's no, I don't wanna play favorites at all. But I wanna say thank you so much for sending the military resources that we desperately needed here in this office.  We truly, we don't have a lot of military billets, but we have a few mighty military billets. And our typical military, they come in and they don't have a manual either. They don't have a checklist. They come in, they hit the road running. And we have had some junior officers come in over the summer that have just knocked it out of the park. I think our 07s, we're gonna have to up our game because our junior officers are truly, truly impressive and could not be more appreciative. So thank you for sending those billets my way. Lou, Tenant General Place. This is our second or third go-around. I'm gonna get the flags right, maybe at my retirement ceremony. But thank you, thank you, sir. It's been an honor to serve in this position and to have your confidence. I simply could not have done it without that. It's been an incredible honor to serve under you, to serve with you. And thank you for your mentorship, your leadership and your support of this mission here in San Antonio. Thank you, sir. Kurt, front row up here, he's my rock and I just can't, this is, I'm doing good today because usually I forget him completely when I, you know, you get time and vision. And I completely, he gave me a pair of diamond earrings at one of these hoping that I would say something and completely, completely forgot him. He didn't even get an honorable mention at the, and my son kept going like this to me like, mom, you know, and I still didn't get it. So Kurt, thank you. I know this hasn't been easy. He's got a lot of Southwest points now and so it'll be good to get home but I think that he's smiling to get me home as well. So thank you, Kurt, for all of your support. I know a lot of you, does anybody here know John Maxwell? Then I met Church one time. Just a great guy, great on leadership. Actually very funny. Does anybody know Ron White, the comedian? Don't be embarrassed. But John Maxwell, if you ever heard him talk or if you ever met him, he's like Ron White's Christian brother. But I like John Maxwell. He does, you know, I'm not really into goofy sayings but one thing I saw this, that he has said this a few times, a great leader's vision comes from passion, not their position. A great leader's vision comes from passion, not their position. And you know, in our world, in our industry, in the military, that's pretty counterintuitive because we're all about positions and we have rank and we have structure. But I truly believe in what we're doing. I truly believe in what we're doing. I would not have taken the job for the position. I took the job for the passion because I'd really, really believe in where we need to go and what we need to accomplish. I truly do. And it's all about my passion where I wouldn't be here. You know, these positions that we're in are very fleeting. You're here one day and gone the next. They're very fleeting. Rank is fleeting. Everything that we do, it's tomorrow. It could be a lot different or gone. And so I encourage all of us that to have a little passionate skin in the game and no matter what you do. And I think that when you do that, it really makes it all worthwhile. And this has been extremely worthwhile, extremely worthwhile to me. So another thought out there is that every time a new leader comes into an organization, you're like hope just walked in the door. New leaders bring hope, right? Hope just walked in the door. Every leader should bring in new hope. They should bring in new ideas, new energy, new motivation, new perspective. And I know that without a doubt, General Cox will do just that. He will do just that, sir. I know that he's gonna come to this organization and he's just gonna take it right to the next level. It'll be fantastic. And I'm excited to hear.  But sir, I just know you're gonna do a great job and really take this to the new level. So there's some good news here, General Cox. I'm a size six and a half shoe. That's it, it's tiny. You got little, little shoes to fill. Little shoes. There's a rainbow at every little shoes to fill. So sir, I'm so happy for you and Dr. Cox. Thank you so much for being here today as well. So it's a pleasure to hand this flag over to you today. Thank you. Thank you very much, ma'am. Ladies and gentlemen, the director of Small Market and Standalone Military Medical Treatment Facility Organization, Brigadier General E. Darren Cox. Well, good morning, SSO. General Wojac, that's a tough act to follow. Thank you very much. Well, good morning everybody. It's certainly wonderful to see everyone assembled here and it's a great day to be part of the military health system and celebrate the first ever change of directorship for the SSO. To our distinguished visitors, community leaders and partners, friends of the DHA and family members here, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules to be here for this historic moment. You honor us with your presence. Lieutenant General Placer, thank you for the trust and confidence you've placed in me to continue to lead the SSO forward. A special thank you, I'm not gonna forget my spouse, although I have done that before as she will attest. A special thank you to my wife, Dr. Kathleen Cox, who's always given me steadfast support and who, along with our two sons, Adam and Caleb, has sacrificed much over my military career. I also wanna recognize the folks who had dignity, professionalism and a speedy court at this ceremony. Thank you to the U.S. Air Force Band of the West, the Met Sea Color Guard, and Medcom's Chaplain, Dean Akers. A ceremony like this does not happen without a great deal of planning and effort. So a special thank you to Commander Sammons, Chief Mass Sergeant Ellis, and everyone at the SSO who helped organize this event. Also here today, whether in person or virtually, are the leadership teams from our 17 small market and 41 standalone medical treatment facilities. I trust you will let your staff know how much they are valued for the tireless work they do to provide world-class healthcare across our 32 state footprint and Guantanamo Bay Cuba. I look forward to serving with you as we continue our vital mission of providing healthcare delivery, force health protection, and strategic medical readiness as a combat support agency. Thank you for all for what you do each and every day to make a difference for our service members, their family members, and our retirees. Lieutenant General Place, I heard and acknowledge your charges today. We will continue to embrace the vision of the military health system transformation. The SSO team will diligently work every day to achieve our mission with caring professionalism while we keep our DHA priorities of great outcomes, a ready medical force, satisfied patients, and a fulfilled staff at the forefront of all we do. We will remain steadfast in our mission focus as an integral part of the military health system and its future. Major General Oyek, ma'am, thank you for the tremendous work setting up the SSO, literally by yourself at first, setting the conditions for success and leading with excellence through certification as an intermediate management organization and the establishment ceremony last December. What you and your team have done and what you've been able to accomplish in such a short period of time, especially in the setting of operational missions and COVID-19, is nothing short of remarkable and is a testament to your selfless service, your leadership, and your dedication to our personnel and our patients. Thank you again, literally a historic endeavor. Today, the SSO, as noted, serves hundreds of thousands of active duty service members, their families, and our retirees and comprises more than 25% of the DHA outpatient workload and almost 20% of the inpatient beds. I am in awe of the tremendous accomplishments and responsibilities of this organization and pledge to work every day to sustain its support to our MTFs and to our patients. Change is inevitable, but one constant is the healthcare we provide for the less than 1% of our nation's population who have signed on the dotted line and who risked their lives for the betterment of our great United States. These men and women pledge their lives to protect our country. They deserve no less than our very best. There is no greater honor than to serve those who serve our nation. Thank you for your attendance today. You honor the men and women of the SSO by your attendance. Thanks very much. Thank you Brigadier General Cox. Will the guests please rise? Chaplain Acres, will you now deliver the benediction? Please receive this blessing, this benediction. Blessed is the leader who knows where to go, why to go there, and how to get there. Blessed is the leader who knows no discouragement. Blessed is the leader who knows how to lead without being a dictator. Blessed is the leader who leads for the good of the most concerned, not for personal gratification. Blessed is the leader who develops leaders while leading. Blessed is the leader with a head in the cloud and feet on the ground. Blessed is the leader who considers leadership an opportunity to serve. Amen. Thank you Chaplain Acres. Ladies and gentlemen, please remain standing for the playing of the joint service medley and remain standing for the departure of the official party. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's ceremony. Please join Brigadier General Cox and his wife Dr. Kathleen Cox at the front of the room for the receiving line. Afterwards you are invited to join Brigadier General Cox in the second floor break room located behind you to the back left corner of the room for reception with light refreshments.


Salt-affected soils include both sialine and sodic soils. Sailing soils contain an excessive amount of soluble salts. The presence of soluble salt makes it difficult for plants to absorb water from the soil. Sodic soils carry high amounts of absorbed sodium ions that damage soil structure. Soils become hard and compact when dry and sticky when wet. Both sialine and sodic conditions considerably reduce the agricultural productivity. Over 833 million hectares are salt-affected soils. The map currently covers 73% of the global land area. What are the drivers of salt-affected soils? There are natural and human-induced sialine and sodic soils. In arid, semi-arid and coastal environments, sialine and sodic soils are naturally present. These soils are not degraded but typical of these landscapes, where halophetic vegetation is present. The Unisalt Flat in Bolivia is an example of this type of landscape and soil. All the sialine soils surrounding the lake are used to produce crops, particularly the quinoa reels, which is a very nutritious crop. These soils also produce natural vegetation eaten by camelids. Human-induced sialinization and sodification. The main drivers are unsustainable agricultural practices. Irrigation with poor quality water. Removal of deep-rooted vegetation resulting on raised water table. Water pumping at the coastal plains. Overuse of fertilizers. Because of climate change, soils at coastal areas are facing seawater intrusion, causing salinity and sodicity. What can we do? Conserve natural ecosystems, prone to salinity and sodicity. Manage soils and water sustainably. Apply appropriate irrigation practices and adopted crops. Manage salt-affected soils in harmony with nature. Let's work together to halve soil salinity and boost soil productivity.


I wanna think about the nature of literacy because you may think you know what literacy is. You may think you know what learning is all about, but things are changing. So in particular, I want to start this discussion by asking you an obvious question. Are you literate? Now that may seem obvious to you. We are all presumably librarians or librarian friends or technology people, but I walked around Google and I asked this question. Are you literate? Are you literate? And I got the best answer from one of my colleagues who said, what do you take me for? And illiterate troglodyte, which answers the question beautifully, right? Anybody who has that low frequency term in their vocabulary has a particular kind of literacy, right? Not everyone can use the word troglodyte in hand-to-hand combat or conversation. So it's an interesting question now. So I started this quest. What does it mean to be literate today? Well, the dictionary will tell you it's the ability to read and write. But if you start looking in, say, any library's catalog and you search for the term literate or literacy, you can discover that we can be literate about anything, right? There are books about financial literacy, computer literacy, media literacy, emotional literacy, and so on. So I wanna talk about literacy in a particular way. It's not only just the ability to read and write, but it's the ability to read and write in a particular symbol system. I'll tell you what that means in a second. But in particular, it's operationally defined. I can't give you a platonic definition of literacy, but I can say it's defined with respect to your culture, with respect to your social group. It also has associated with it an assumed body of knowledge. You may be able to read and write, but if you don't know who the first president of the United States is, then you're kind of in some sense in the U.S., not literate, right? You can read and write, but you don't know anything. So here's a provisional definition. Literacy is the ability to function operationally within a domain. You can read and write, answer questions, and function critically, critically in that domain. You're not just a tabular ross, you don't just accept these things blankly. And so because I work at Google, I obviously did the obvious piece of research, which is to look at the use of the word literacy over time. This surprised the heck out of me. I hope it surprises you too. Because nobody talked about literacy before 1915? What, really? Yeah, really. I mean, that's the result of scanning roughly 10 million books in English. So what's happening here? What happened? Well, one thing that's really interesting to know is in 1917, there was the Immigration Act, which I think a lot of you know about here, also known as the Asiatic Bard Zone Act passed away Congress in 1917. One of the things it did was to institute a literacy requirement. So this is basically a tested post on all immigrants entering the US who over the age of 15 had to be able to read and write at least 30 to 40 words to show that they were capable of reading. So what does this mean for literacy now? Let me tell you a story. Google has a lot of really cool cafes, and there's one there called The Pair Republic.  It's a take off on the California flag, right? So it's on a street called Pair Avenue. Yeah, clever. But there's a big mural in that cafe, and it starts like this. And these are all my photographs of that mural. The origin of the California state flag is a flub of historic proportions. And basically says a Captain Jedediah Bartlett, who by the way invented the Bartlett pair. In 1846, there was this big movement in the Californios, among the people here, well, Vallejo and Sonoma, who arrested Vallejo and seized the Sonoma Plaza. So Bartlett, who was a captain in that force, who's usual gay, he was the farmer, right, and developed that kind of pair, said that we want to symbolize the richness of our agricultural heritage in California. So he sends that recommendation, I wanna flag with a pair on it. And he sends it to Mary Todd Lincoln's nephew, who misread the note and painted a bear instead of a pair, okay? You can't stop history. And so the story goes that this is how we got the bear flag republic, okay? Now, this is vast. It's basically that long, as long as that wall at Google. And of course, you know, this is the real state flag, with a rather escance-looking bear on it. And so is that story true? Is that how we ended up with a bear? Does anybody know? Okay. So I asked 50 Googlers who work in that building. Is that true? 24%, I don't know. 12%, only 12% did a search to verify the story. 60% of them believe it's true. 60% of them more than half believe it's true. And of the people who did the search, two-thirds of it got it wrong. Are they literate? In what sense do they know anything about California history, right? So now here's the thing. If you go to Google and search for bear flag republic, you will find, guess what? A Snopes article saying it's true. Is my California history that wrong? What's going on here? If you go and look at the Snopes article, that's it. That was the flag that Jedediya Bartlett wanted. So is it true? So now here's the thing. So those two-thirds of the people who actually searched for that read the Snopes article and said, oh, wow, green check mark, done, must be true. If you read the Snopes article carefully, the article is actually about false authority. How carefully should you be reading Snopes articles?  Pay attention next time. So I would argue Snopes has failed us in this. I know they're trying to be clever but I understand their point, but there are 60% of Googlers in that building who think that's the true story of the California flag. Oh my God. And in particular, if you now go to Google and type in golden state flag, of course this is what you'll see. So let me ask you, are Googlers literate? Or in particular, remember what I said about reading and writing? Who's illiterate? Who can read and write that? Now in this audience, half of you probably, right? In other audiences, zero percent of people raise their hand. So literacy I think is an interesting concept. It's something that we aspire to, something we want in ourselves, in our students, in our children, our patrons. But it actually is more than just being able to read and write. It's also that you understand that you will have gaps in your knowledge. So this is a kind of metacognitive understanding of literacy. You understand that you don't know everything.  You have an attitude of curiosity about the world. But you can't look up everything. So there's the skill of triage, right? We have to understand how to do these things. So what do we need to know here? We have built a computer the size of the planet, basically. And we got all these exabytes of information on it. And so if you go to your favorite search engine and you type in, say, Saint-Chapelle because you want to learn more about that place in Paris, you can probably land on a book, which will look like that. But if you go to images and do that same search, you will see the true glory and splendor of the Saint-Chapelle Chapel in Paris. Now, what you may or may not know is that you can find that in images, Google images trivially. You can look kind of Bing images. You can look at it from Baidu images. Doesn't matter. You'll find images like that. Fantastic. What you may not know is that you can actually go and there is a Street View version. And so this is a little video of me actually moving around inside the Street View of the inside of Saint-Chapelle. Did you know you could do that? Are you literate? Interesting question, right? I don't want to cast dispersions. But this whole talk is about how do we know what we know and what's possible to find. For instance, here's a key idea. The information world is not uniform, flat, and equally accessible. Surprise, surprise, right? Here's an example where Google has spent a lot of time and money to build a cultural institute in Paris, which basically highlights different topics, different museum collections. And it's part of our effort to foreground a lot of this stuff. So there's a wonderful space and collection about Angkor Wat, fabulous. 3D CAD models, history, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The thing is when you search for Angkor Wat, this is buried on page three. You've watched your patrons. Nobody goes there. So you kind of have to know it exists. So an interesting aspect of literacy is knowing what's possible. Or at least having a dream of what's possible. For example, do you know that Google has an immense collection of archival newspapers? This is the Afro-American ledger in Baltimore, one of the first black-owned newspapers in the United States. We've got the entire print run. Did you know that was possible? So what this is, it brings up this really interesting question about what is it possible to know and how do you know it? So for example, I want to show you this couple seconds of this video of this woman putting on a VR headset and being able to look at the world through a VR environment. You can't get to that location in Florence. You can't get to a lot of these places. But this is through your headset. This is available on your laptop.  And yet this is all easily accessible to you. Here, a person grabs the sun and changes time, literally. So you can go forward and backwards in time. So I come at this, this whole discussion from my particular perspective, which is I'm a cyber-tribal, techno-cognitive anthropologist. I study how people use information systems, not just Google, but all kinds of information systems, including your library, reference librarians, including all kinds of stuff. How do they think about that and how do they know about it? But I'm also a software engineer, an AI guy, and a research scientist. And in particular, I'm gray enough that I remember this. Do you remember life before Google? Right. You've been that person, haven't you? But now, of course, we've got the entire internet in our pocket. And in particular, about that VR thing, the availability of AR and VR on your laptop or on your phone changes the way you think about information. It changes the way you think about place. It changes the way you think about culture. It certainly changes the way you think about accessibility. So for example, here is the Street View version of Stonehenge. It's difficult to look up what's growing on the inside of Stonehenge. But with Street View, you can just toggle around inside of there and look. Go check it out. So here, this is me, Street View, Stonehenge. If I want to see what's on the inside of those stones, you can just do it. And we've been developing, and I mean, we broadly, not just Google, but also Facebook, Bing, and so on, all these different kinds of things. I want to highlight Google Translate. So Google Translate, you know about. It's had its issues. It's getting significantly better. Give us another five years, and it's going to be great. But in particular, in 2015, Jerry McCann and his colleague Shane McKay, he were driving on an ambulance in Quark. And they picked up a woman who was in the late stages of labor. And they're thinking, great, I need to give her instruction. But she only spoke Swahili, and they only speak English. What do they do? Well, Jerry pulled out his phone and said, push, and translated to Swahili. You see the little speaker icon there? He kept hitting that. Push, push, push. And now that baby is a happy baby living in Quark. So having that kind of availability of deeper kinds of interesting information, a utility like that, is game changing for us. So what does it mean? What do we need to know about finding information and learning now? Because we all grew up in a world like this. Excuse me, younger people. You did not grow up in a world like this. I grew up in a world like this, right? This is fantastic. Wait, question. How many people have used one of these? OK, this is a librarian group. Sometimes I give that, I ask that same question, nobody raises their hand. They say, what is that? And I have to explain it. It's a card catalog, which is indexed by, in this case, author's last name. Suppose you want to search by the author's first name. Well, you know what to do. You take out all the cards and sort them by first name. No, you don't. That's insane. More importantly for us, you would never think to do that because that's insane. We obviously, though, if I give that to an Excel spreadsheet, you click column B, author's first name. Half a second later, you have it. Computation qualitatively, fundamentally, changes the way we think about information. I'm also angry. But you see my point, right? These kinds of things shift the ability to think about what's possible. So what do we think about what's possible? What kinds of things can you find online? Don't say everything. I've interviewed a lot of people, primarily younger people, who when I asked them that question, they say, I can find anything. What do you mean? Of course I can find anything. Not true. And you know that better than anyone. But let me give an example because here's a photograph a friend of mine took on his cell phone. He says, ha ha, Dan, that you can't guess where that is. And it's true. It's kind of a generic beach, right? But what my friends did not know is that almost every cell phone photograph, right, has EXIF metadata attached to it. And in particular, at the bottom, is the lat long. So I take that and drop that in a Google Maps and go to Google Street View at that location. That's, you can see what I've done there. That's Street View. That's the photograph. That's Street View. Oh, yeah, it's different. It's got a log on it. But not only do I know where it was taken, I know what time and day he was there when he took the photograph, right? Did you know when you sent a cell phone photograph, you're sending your location, right? You have to, I think, understand that. And that's part of what I mean by knowing about. Literacy now means knowing what's possible. Literacy means knowing the access method, not necessarily for everything. But if you don't know what you're giving up when you do that, you're not particularly connected, not particularly informed. Now, this is interesting because as a research scientist, I do lots and lots of studies. So one study I did was I asked people, how often do you search?  So I did 32 or whatever, right? So here's the thing. When I ask people, how confident are you? 92% they're confident or very confident in their search skill. 92% of your patrons will say that to me, right? The others say moderately confident. 66% of them search less than one time per day. Over half do less than one search a day, right? For less than five minutes. Trust me, you don't get good at anything doing it for roughly 10 minutes a week. You just don't, right? So I wanna bring out this notion that I call informacy, which you may have heard of as information literacy. But too often, the phrase information literacy means learning how to run Excel or knowing how to open up Acrobat file. That's not what I mean. I mean knowing what information is as a first class thing. Knowing, for example, what an index is, knowing what a sort order is, knowing how information is structured. I'll use a word from Ramesh's talk. What an ontology is, you don't need to know what that word means, but it means roughly how is that stuff organized? If you don't know how information is organized, you're kind of at a disadvantage. So knowing what information is and how to use and interact with it. Now let me show you an example here. This is a short video from one of my lab studies where I asked the guy in the study, to find something interesting to do in San Francisco on the weekend. Now this is a version of Google from a couple of years ago, so it looks a little bit different, but it ignored the pink dot. That's where he's looking on the screen, but because he's in my lab and so on. But listen to what he says. I love Laura laughing nervously in the background there. Like, oh no, where's he going with this? So why is that clip funny? It's funny because he doesn't know what's on the internet. He has no concept that that's a dangerous NSFW, right? Kind of query. Totally not safe for work. I'm gonna stop the video there because the next query is adult activities San Francisco Saturday night. Can't show you that. Don't do it now, please. But you see my point, right? He really does not understand what's out there. He would not have done it with my young research associate if he'd known that, right? Now one of the things I find so fascinating about this is how much people don't know. So I assume you all know how to find text on a webpage. You go to the webpage, you type command F, edit find, control F, whatever, right? So what's interesting about this is, if you're on a Macintosh, you do it that way. If you're on a PC, you do it that way. It's the same thing. Now the thing that kills me about this is how little people seem to know that skill. Wait, isn't that fundamental? Well, I did a study where I asked a bunch of people to find on this webpage, which is just the results of a 5K, how long did it take Beth Smith to run this race? How long do you think it would take you? 10 seconds, Macs, something like that? So I ran this with a bunch of people and here's the result. That's time access across the bottom, going from that bump at roughly 15 seconds to a whole bunch of people that were more than 300 seconds. Wait a second. How long is 300 seconds? Five minutes. What are they doing? Yeah, they're visually scanning, right? So what that tells me is they don't know control F. And so it doesn't matter how I ask it. I find a lot of people like that. Surprising result is if you, more than two minutes there, 120 seconds, you're wrong 25% of the time. Excuse me. How can you be wrong 25% of the time? Because people who don't know control F don't know control C. They don't know copy. They don't know paste. And so they try to enter the number into my form by they inevitably drop a digit, okay? They're fundamentally not connected to the way the information world really works. So in particular, I've asked this question of 2,000 people, 90% of English teachers, 51%. 51% of the English teachers of your children don't know control F. Yeah, 93% of Firefox users have never used control F, okay? It goes on and on. Doesn't matter how many times I repeat it. It's the same striking result. People have no clue how to find text on a page. Let alone Acrobat, let alone any of the systems you have here, right? So we've asked questions like this endlessly.  And if the people who know control F, the result is they're 12% faster. That is they're 12% faster total time to result. And they're also more accurate. 12% is a huge amount. A huge amount. Now, there's something we said about this. Like, where did you learn control F? Yeah, I don't remember either, right? On the other hand, when I ask people, do you know control F? They say, oh, no, no, no, no. Who was supposed to teach me? Was it you? Librarians? Wasn't the English teacher? Wasn't the math teacher? Wasn't the science teacher? So there's disconnect going on between the digerati, us, and the people who are not the digerati, everyone else, right? So one of the things that this implies is that people in the inside of the information world know a lot of stuff. You are literate, digitally literate in an interesting way. For example, I started making a list of all the different genres and kinds of things I could find. This is a fool's errand. There's a million of them, right? Kind of goes on and on. But let's talk for a second about spoof sites. Everybody here knows what a spoof site is, right? You have probably used, in your class, as the great Pacific Northwest tree octopus website. For anybody who hasn't seen it, it's a spoof? Don't believe it, right? But it gets a little bit more complicated when you look at something like this, which is a beautifully produced, high quality website advertising R.I. hospital, R.Y. hospital. And it's really nicely done. They take credit cards, there's a phone number, the street address, everything. It's not until you get to that page you start wondering about the hospital. Male pregnancy, really? Is that a thing now? Well, it turns out when you dig deeply enough, you discover that's a designer's demo site. He just made stuff up. But a lot of people get fooled by stuff like that. So you need to know that spoof exists. And in particular, videos spoofed exist. Now, here's a fun one. You might've seen this on CNN, where Pope Francis goes to this chapel and then does a miraculous thing. You're laughing. That's a miracle, right? It's a miracle of image editing, right? Now, you obviously looked at that and said eh, I don't believe it, right? It doesn't concord, it doesn't match with what you think, what you understand about the world, but there's more. People who are going to be using these systems, people who are literate now, need to understand how to think critically, how to look at media like that and understand. It's probably not accurate. And in particular, they also need to know conventions of the culture. So we all know emoticons, right? We recognize the semantics of each of those, right? You know, the terms like NSFW, ROTFL, right? You know those terms. But we have to recognize not all of our patrons do because I found this on a famous question answering site. Is it true Rosa Parks would have moved to the back of us but she was listening to her iPod? And the answer, the best answer, chose by the askers, yeah, it's true. And then the responses, which is fantastic. She gives it five stars and says, thank you, I'll put that in my report. You have the nicest avatar. So what happened here? What happened was the asker didn't understand what that symbol meant. Now you need to know that's the universal symbol for a sarcastic response. So the asker didn't understand that. And yet they based their credibility assessment on the beauty of an avatar. Trust me, that's not the right way to evaluate credibility of a source, right? Of course, the weird thing is if you define that on Google, it'll tell you it's sticking the tongue out. It's a sarcastic reply, it's not serious. They missed that part of the culture, right? One of the interesting things about the internet is it's trans-cultural, it is trans-national. And so you need to be able to look up stuff safe in other cultures like this one. I don't know about you, but that looks like kind of a fun icon or emoticon I should use in my text to my daughter, right? Okay, some of you get it, right? The rest of you should look it up. Because it's actually the love hotel emoji. And an eggplant is not an eggplant. Just so you know, right? So there are these interesting, deeply embedded cultural things, but the beauty is you can look these things up.  Now one of the things to understand is that a literate user understands how to use a dictionary, what a sort order, a canonical sort order for a text star, and so on. You also understand that you can do things like this and look up what that image is. So where was that photograph taken? Does everybody know about Google Reversed Image Search? Yeah, you do a reverse image search and you find it was actually taken outside of Las Vegas at Red Rocks, beautiful place. You can search for archival content. Here's an image, something you may have found in a book. You photograph it, you search for it and discover it's actually from Napoleon's scientific, shall we say, voyage to Egypt. You can find this stuff instantly. It changes the equation. I didn't know about you, but when I was growing up, that was an impossible task. So all of a sudden, impossible searches have become trivial, they've become fast. That puts an interesting burden on us as teachers to teach how to do these things in a smart way because content changes, right? We looked at this kind of list before. Let's talk about video for a second. Not only has this nature of video now changed in fundamental ways, but every minute we're here, 400 hours of content is being uploaded to YouTube. 400 hours. So let's think about Google Images.  We index all those things. Let's talk about scholarly papers. 1.8 million papers in 28,000 different journals, some of which have quality problems like this one. I'm not gonna read it to you, but that's an actual paper published in an actual journal that has zero quality control, what we call vampire journals. The question for us at Google is, how do we automatically detect vampire journals? This one's easy. Other papers are harder to tell. And of course, libraries are also subject to this because there are a lot of vampire books. If you find a book by the author Lambert M. Sirhone, don't buy it. They're basically reprints of Wikipedia articles for which they will charge you $87, okay? It's an interesting way of spamming the Amazon catalog because they could write a program. So this person has over 120,000 publications. I don't think so. Something's wrong here. It goes on and on, right? There are millions of things like this, but importantly, we live in this interesting adversarial time where you can also search for applications that are completely bogus. No, you cannot turn your phone into a cattle prod. You cannot do a pregnancy detection test on your cell phone, but there are apps you can buy that will sell that property to you. We need to teach this to our patrons. You can index things, but is this part of your purview? Is this part of your catalog? Do you teach your patrons how to do this? So you can do this kind of stuff. You can search for these things and different applications give you all kinds of metadata filtering, the ability to search for education apps within a particular style and genre and so on. So the search engines now index these things, right? We can search for a particular thing and you can actually go into the app itself from the browser, which is a remarkable thing. It's actually running in a cloud somewhere. How does one index these AI applications like an agent? So Google Home devices or Alexa are all powerful providers of information, but how do you search for them, right? You can go to Google Home and say, what is the ALA? They will tell you, knowing full well that there's a description of it. But think about this. There's a whole rest of the world which speaks another language than American English, American standard English. So when I was in Japan, I heard this woman singing on the radio and I thought, oh, that's great. I keep hearing her name on the radio and it's suji on it or something like that. So I go to Google and I type in my approximation of that. It spell corrects it in English. That's a cute trick. It took my English spelling and figured out what the correct Japanese spelling should be and now I have her music on my phone. So there's this possibility of doing international trans-cultural kinds of things and in particular, have you ever looked at the Italian Wikipedia? Maybe not, but it's worth looking at other Wikipedia. So here's the English and the Italian version that the table of contents for the Wikipedia articles for Leonardo da Vinci and English and Italian. Notice anything different between them? Yeah, the Italians really care about Leonardo. The bio section of the Italian Wikipedia article is longer than the entire entry in English, completely longer. So once you start looking at multiple languages, different cultures, these are four different languages for the same article. You see where this is going? If you've got computation in your phone, it allows you to do things like that. That's Google Lens running on my phone, doing a replacement in place, using the same font to trick, doing the translation. So, informacy, as I've been thinking about, is being information literate, understanding what kinds of things you can ask, what kinds of responses are possible. So for instance, my son is a big Stanford basketball fan and there's a song that they sing at Stanford. It's like that. And he says to me, dad, I want that on my phone, how do I find it? Dad, you work at Google. How do I find it? And I think about it for a second, I think, oh, let's use Soundtown or Shazam or something like that. No, it doesn't work. It's a thousand drunken Stanford fans singing, right? So these things only work with nice clean recordings, not that. So I said, son, oh, let's do lyric search, right? What are the lyrics?  I say, give up. You're not gonna get it.  He now has that song on his phone. So what did I not get? Content changes. And in particular, all those QA sites, the question and answering sites I was talking about, there's a million of them now. They're super important and they're now answering questions exactly like this one. They're even more important in other cultures. Naver QA site in Korea is massive and it's really rich and interesting. And yet, you know, we're also creating new kinds of media, new kinds of genres of things. So for example, we can now write programs that will go out and find images from different times and then aggregate those into a time lapse.  That's Lombard Street. Notice this is over the course of two years. It is an aggregated time lapse. No one person took this. Who owns the copyright? I don't know, I have no idea, right? More importantly, how do you find such things? How do you find something like this? This is actually not a video. This is a set of images that I pulled off of a Japanese satellite web server and made into a video. Do you know how to do that? Do your patrons know how to do that? So what it's really trying to get to is, how can we shift the culture of us or our patrons and so on to think about these things? So you probably have this book in your stacks, right? 20,000 Leagues Ended In The Sea. What does the title refer to? When I ask people, they typically say, it's about a submarine, right? And that goes down 20,000 leagues. And I say, okay, what is a league? It's a unit of measure about three miles. What's 20,000 leagues in miles? 69,000 miles. What is the diameter of the earth? That's probably not the depth, right? It went to. So what it tells me is that people didn't understand the title. They didn't understand their first four words. What else are you not understanding, right? So what we need to start thinking about is how do we help our patrons become critical thinkers, literate understanders of what we have to offer?  So it's important and it's no longer optional. I mean, when I was in student, when I was in sixth grade, oh yes, critical thinking skills are important. Yeah, okay, now, let's talk about chemistry. All right, it was about like that. But of course, people find websites like that, like epa-facts.com, and believe it's about the EPA in DC. Now, what's odd about that is when you actually look at the about page for epa-facts.com, which is what most people tell you to do, if you want to assess the credibility of a site, go check the about page. Wait, who wrote the about page? The people who run the site, okay? So if you go to epa-facts.com, it says, epa-facts is Project Environmental Policy Alliance dedicated to highlighting the high-cost environmental protection agency, okay, your spidey sense should be ringing at this point, right? A, it's a dot-com site, it's not a dot-gov site. Who knows about dot-gov sites? You do, your patrons have no clue, right? So they don't have a spidey sense going at this point, right? And then there's this weird thing, Environmental Policy Alliance versus Environmental Protection Agency, whatever. If you actually look up the EPA's logo, you see that they're clearly spoofing the logo, right? So when you do this and dig in a little bit more, you say, well, let's check out, where is this place? Well, it's in DC, that makes sense. But it's sweet 800. EPA's in that sweet, really? So let's look up the EPA's address, or actually let's look up that street address, and you'll find another company there called Berman and Company. Wait, the EPA shares a sweet with Berman and Company? My spidey sense is going thermonuclear at this point, right? So let's look up the real EPA, and they are at 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue, that makes sense, right? That's constant with everything you know. Them sharing office space with a lobbying firm, which is what Berman and Company is, makes no sense. Okay, now here's the striking thing. My colleague, Sam Weinberg at Stanford, has found out that 80% of university, at a well-known West Coast university, shall we say, can't do this. 80% of university people, students, at a well-known West Coast university cannot do this. And so when you end up with people looking at things like that, they don't understand that they're all cloned. That's all made up stuff. They don't understand that you can copy an entire website. So we end up with this interesting quality quantity paradox. We have a universe of content, but little kind of speculation issues with quality. How do we teach? How do we help our patrons become discerning quality readers? What do you need to know to be literate? You need to know your tools. How many people know what that is? Okay, it's awesome. I didn't learn about it until I was 35. And you may think of me, oh Dan, you're so illiterate, you know nothing. How many men know what that is? Okay, not to cast this version, but you know, I know what it is. I use it all the time. It's a thread-puller, right?  Okay, how many people know what that is? Doesn't matter. But with search by image, you can figure out what these things are. More importantly, if you go and know how to search for a tool that changes the way you think about content. So for example, I've given this problem to, at this point, probably 1,000 different people. But in this study, I did it for 250 Google search engineers. The people who built Google for you, right? I asked them, can you find this house? It's 900 University Avenue downtown Palo Alto. Can you find an aerial photo of this house taken before 1977? How hard can that be? None of them got it right. Zero. I asked 2,000 people to do this same task. Gave them as much time as they want. One person out of 2,000 got it. He was not a librarian. Okay, so what went wrong, right? The solution you should have known about, in particular, the Google engineers should have known about, is that we have this thing called Google Earth, which has the ability to go back in time. How many people knew that, right? There's archival aerial imagery in Google Earth. And so this is a picture of that location, 1948. Check it out. Check San Francisco. In particular, check the wartime, because the city was all blacked out, as you would expect, right? So we need to think, how can we communicate and help become literate? How can we tell our patrons ourselves how to do these things? Because not only is there unbounded new interesting opportunities, new kinds of content, but we also live in a world where fake content happens. This is Superstorms Dandy, right? New Jersey. And it was trivial to find out that that was a fake photograph. No, there were not sharks in New Jersey, right? But as Hemingway said, every person should have a built-in craft detector, although it gets hard, because this was from the previous. Yeah, I'm going to go a couple of minutes over. Actually, I have four minutes left on my timer, because I have a millisecond correct timer. This is the Grand Marft Harkin or Peter Cushing, who obviously died before that movie was made. But we can build synthespians, build a computer graphics model and light it appropriately, you get great. Now, carrying this forward, there's now, of course, this property is behavior of deepfakes. Jennifer Lawrence at Golden Globes and Stephen Buscemi on the right. You can combine those two images, creating a very kind of creepy thing. You can do this in video. Ick, right? So, now, you've probably seen the Obama one or the Trump one, there's a million of them out there, but what I want to tell you is you can search for these things. You can grab a frame from that and search for it and we'll tell you it's the deepfake of Jennifer Lawrence. So, we need to teach our students and ourselves how to be better, how to be learning for these things. And so, I'm going to honor the time here. I'm going to skip forward a little bit. This is a very interesting topic here but I'm going to skip forward to the final minute or two. So, one thing to realize is that we need to be able to teach these basic skills. Learning how to ask the right questions, knowing what tools exist, what resources exist. And this is fundamental to what we do. We do, both you as librarians, you as information, content providers, us as indexers of that content. And we need to understand what information available, the content that's available online and offline, and how to transfer these skills to our patrons, to our students, to ourselves. Because in order to become an informant, we need to continuously develop these skills going forward. So, we, and I'm talking about now us, need to design these information systems to help support that. Because it's going to be lifelong learning. We need to build explanations of why I think they're showing up the way they are. We need to teach our people how to do this. And so, I've built a online massive open course called powersearchingwithgoogle.com. And to date, we've had 4.4 million students take that. So, with my colleague Anne Fernald in the back, we just redid it, so it's brand new. So, if you're looking for online course for your patrons, there's one. I write a blog, and every week I pose a question, and then the next week I answer it and show you how to do it. That's a way to get smarter. And like Ramesh, we've all got new books. Mine launched last week, it's called The Joy of Search. And it has a lot of these examples in the book. And it's overtly an attempt to help people through the mechanism of stories, learn how to become more informed and more better searchers. Because tomorrow's illiterate, as Alvin Toffler pointed out so long ago. Tomorrow's illiterates will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. And so, I want to end there with the thought that it's important for all of us, all of us, to understand what's possible, what's out there, what we can do, and most importantly, to be an informant learner, learn how to learn the next thing. That's a kind of metacognitive trick that we all need to incorporate in our daily lives. It's not enough to have learned library of science once upon a time, because it's changing daily. Thank you very much.


In many cities there's still a tendency to think of the climate change problem as an isolated problem that sits in the future. My name is Eric Zussman and I am a research director at the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies based in Hayama, Japan. So we will be working with three Japanese cities to help demonstrate the different types of health benefits that will come from their climate change planning and then we'll also provide an opportunity for policy makers from those cities to interact and share experiences with Paris, France and Austin, Texas by getting the policy makers and to some extent the politicians directly involved in this co-design process. We can demonstrate how this is locally relevant and also make the connection between not only good policy but also good politics.


Welcome to Spotlight. I'm Colin Lauver. Spotlight uses a special English method of broadcasting. It is easier for people to understand no matter where in the world they live. A small girl walks through the streets. She is cold and hungry. Where can she find help on a cold winter's day? Matches! Light your fires with my matches. Would you like to buy some matches, sir? What about you, madam? They are the best kind. Strike them against any wall. They will burn. Someone must want some matches. Anyone? The Little Match Girl is a popular story. Hans Christian Andersen wrote this story. He wrote many children's stories in the 1800s. People like to tell the story of the Little Match Girl during the Christmas season. Both adults and children enjoy it. But is it a sad story or a happy story? Liz Wade tells the story of the Little Match Girl. A cold wind blows across the town. People hurry along, holding their warm coats close to their bodies. It is a cold winter. They will be happy to get home to their warm fires and nice food. Street sellers count their money at the end of the day. But for the Little Match Girl there is no money to count. No one wants to buy her matches. So she is afraid to go home. Her father will beat her for sure. The Little Girl walks across the street. The snow falls on her long hair. She looks up at the tall, beautiful houses as she passes. She can hear people laughing inside. The smell of food cooking rises in the air. The people are preparing their last meal before the new year. The Little Match Girl walks to a quiet street corner. She sits down, holding her knees. She tries to pull her feet under her body. They are so cold. She has no shoes or coat. Her feet are blue from walking on the cold ground. Maybe she should go home, but even her home is not warm. Her family has no money.   If only she could be warm for just a minute. Then she has an idea. Matches. She has her matches. Her father would be angry if she wasted any matches. But she only wants one. Just one. Maybe it will warm her freezing fingers. The Little Girl gets a match. She strikes it against the wall. Fire. The warm orange light shines in the darkness. The Little Girl looks hard at the small dancing fire. She imagines that she is sitting by a warm cooking oven. It seems so real. She can see the oven. She can feel its heat.  How the fire burns. Then the fire from the match goes out. The oven disappears. The Little Girl is once again in the cold darkness. Only the half-burnt match remains in her hand. The Little Girl is so sad. Her happiness had come and gone so quickly. Maybe she could burn one more match. She takes another. And she strikes it against the wall. Fire lights up her sad face. She smiles. This time she sees the wall become thin. It is almost like paper. She can see through it. Behind it she sees a room. Such beauty. There is a huge table with hot food on it. She can almost taste the hot food.  And suddenly the fire from the match goes out. Once more everything disappears. Only the gray wall remains before her. So the Little Girl strikes another match. The golden fire burns again. This time she is under a huge Christmas tree. Beautiful bells and flowers hang from the tree. Lights shine from its green branches. It is the most beautiful tree she has ever seen. She reaches her hands toward the lights. Then the match goes out. But the Christmas lights begin to change into stars in the sky. One of the stars falls back to earth. The Little Girl thinks to herself, Someone must be dying. The Little Girl starts to think of her dead grandmother. Her grandmother told her that when a star falls from the sky, A soul goes up to God. She misses her grandmother so much. The Little Girl lights another match. This time standing in the light she sees her grandmother. Her grandmother was the only person who ever showed her love. She looks beautiful. The Little Girl cries, Grandmother, take me with you. I know when the fire goes out you will disappear. Please take me with you. The Little Girl takes all the matches. One by one she strikes them against the wall. She burns them quickly so the picture does not disappear. The light shines brighter and brighter. It is as bright as day. She sees her grandmother more clearly. Her grandmother has never been so beautiful. The Little Girl reaches out to her grandmother. Her grandmother stretches out her arms to receive the Little Girl. The Grandmother takes the Little Girl in her arms. They fly together in joy high above the earth. There is no cold, hunger or fear. They are with God. In the corner on the street the Little Girl is leaning against the wall. She has red cheeks and a smiling mouth. But she is frozen. Two years' sun rises on the sad figure. The child sits there, still and cold. She is holding a bundle of half-burned matches. Only a few people walk on the quiet streets. They stop at the street corner. They see a small body on the ground. The people comment, Poor thing, she was trying to keep warm. But no one knew the beautiful things she had seen. They did not know how happy she was to be with her grandmother. She had gone happily into the new year. The Little Match Girl is a popular story at Christmas time. It is an imaginary story. But people see many messages in it. Some people say the Little Match Girl makes them think about people who have less than them. They think about people who may be poor or lonely at Christmas or the holidays. The story encourages them to help people in need. Other people see a message behind the pictures in the story. Each vision made the Little Match Girl feel happy. But the picture she wanted to stay with her was the one of her grandmother. This was the only one that offered a different kind of happiness. Love Unconditional love is another message some people see in the story. The grandmother represents a love that does not die. This love carries the Little Girl to a place without pain or suffering. This makes some people think about God's love and heaven, especially at Christmas time. And they think of his love that will carry them to a better place one day. Heaven Have you heard this story before? Do you think this story was a sad story or a happy story? Tell us what you think. You can leave a comment on our website or email us at contact at spotlightenglish.com You can also find us on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The writer of this program was Marina Santy. The producer was Michio Ozaki. The voices you heard were from the United Kingdom and the United States. You can listen to this program again and read it on the internet at www.spotlightenglish.com This program is called The Story of the Little Match Girl. Visit our website to download our free official app for Android and Apple devices. We hope you can join us again for the next Spotlight program. From all of us at Spotlight, Merry Christmas!