So if you are in New York Assembly Area, you should come in here for the next talk. The next thing that we're going to do is how to think about property. Our speaker is going to be Stephen Consol. He is a private, I'm sorry, he's a patent attorney and leading Libertarian legal theorist, the founder and director of the Center of the Study of Innovative Freedom and Libertarian Papers. A former adjunct professor at the South Texas College of Law, who has published numerous articles and books on IP law, international law, and the application of Libertarian principles to legal topics. Please welcome, attorney of Kinsella Law Group. Sorry, Kinsella Law Group, Southern Kinsella. That's good, thank you. Thank you very much. I'm really glad to be here. This is my second appearance at a pre-state event. I was at Pork Fest a few years ago, which was fun.  His church is right down the road from where I live.  Don't watch the rest of it, but he'll say, Well, God bless you. Welcome into our homes. We'll make you feel right at home. I'd like to start with something funny. And then he tells a corny joke that you can tell in front of kids and grandparents. So in that light, I'd like to start with something funny. I don't usually tell a joke, but this one seemed appropriate to this crowd. So the joke is, some of you may have heard it. So you can groan if you like. Why do anarchists drink herbal tea? That's one answer. That's not funny. That's really not funny. Now, because property is theft, there's a lady in the gym near my house where I sometimes work out not too much, as you can tell. And she said, I looked you up on the internet because I'm always talking about libertarianism around the ladies that work out with me.  And I listened to one of your podcasts. And something about corporations, I didn't really understand. It was kind of boring. I said, she said, send me one of your better talks. And I thought about it and I said, I don't really have any good talks to be honest. Not for normal people. I don't really like to talk. I'm not a good speaker and everything I talk about is something that no normal people are interested in. But I do like to teach and I like to think. I speak because that's the only way to do it sometimes. So I am a patent lawyer, which is one of the most boring fields of law. And when BJ called me and wanted me to speak, I said, please not IP again, because I've done that 200 times. And he said, well, think of something with really boring titles that you're a boring patent lawyer. So I thought of this title, right? How to think about property is Nathaniel, Barbara Brandon's course, Principles of Efficient Thinking was already taken. So I had to come up with a different title. There we go. Okay, I'm going to start out with a quote that you've all heard. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And that was written by Thomas Jefferson or the young kids now say written. And I don't like tees for some reason. Hillary Clinton. Anyway. It might have been Galambos, who's another libertarian nut, thinks that Thomas Paine wrote it, but he also thinks an ultra property should last forever. So I discount a lot of things Galambos says. So one question is why doesn't it say life, liberty, and property? And there's lots of theories about this. One theory is that property is alienable unlike the other rights, like the right to life and liberty. They're unalienable and Jefferson was listening to unalienable rights. But as some law professors have pointed out, that really doesn't make any sense because the right to property is not unalienable. Particularly things that you own, you can sell, but that doesn't mean your right to property is unalienable. There are other theories that maybe the pursuit of happiness sounded better or maybe property was sitting lower or maybe it included it. Jefferson used that before. Some theorized Jefferson was becoming socialist and so he left property out because he was becoming socialist, which is I think pretty much nonsensical because he did use that phrase in other writings later and before. It was used by Locke. It was used in the Virginia Declaration of Rights and lots of other places. But property's not in there and that's a little uncomfortable for some libertarians because we emphasize property all the time. In fact, you know, some people have, we wrestled over what name we should call ourselves libertarians. Some of us go by volunteerists, some of us say anarchist. I think some say we're liberals or classical liberals. Henry Haslett proposed a term cooperation as to which I've always kind of liked, but it never took off. Properitarian, it would work, but it's sort of been hijacked by these alt-right types. Kind of incurred due little. An odd man I met several years ago. And anyway, it's not exactly correct. We're not properitarians. What makes libertarians unique is not that we believe in property rights. If you think about it, every political system believes in property rights. That is, the right to control resources is assigned by their legal system to some owners. The question is, who are the owners and how are the rights assigned? I mean, in North Korea or in communist Russia, in a sense, the state is the owner or the collective. So there's always property rights. The question is, who's the owner? Anyway, why would you say life, liberty and property, as if these are separate things? Why would libertarians obsess about property if we believe in liberty, which is part of the name that we use for our self-liberty? These things are all inextricably linked. You can't have liberty without property. And as we'll get to later, property is the way of implementing liberty. Now, like as Ayn Rand had pointed out, all rights are human rights. They're individual human rights. And as Murray Rothbard himself emphasized, all human rights are property rights. That's the right to control some scarce resource in the world. And, of course, we get the silly complaints from socialists that we believe that property has rights, which of course is not what we mean. We don't think that our chairs or our cars have rights. Just like when we believe states' rights as a decentralized principle to limit federal power, it doesn't mean we believe states actually have rights. That's a silly argument. One of my favorite legal scholars recently deceased was a very prominent Greek scholar from Louisiana. A Louisiana scholar from Greece named Anthony Yiannopoulos, not the blonde hair of Yiannopoulos who's fallen out of favor with the world. He wrote a great legal treatise called Property, and it's about the civil law property. Louisiana is a civil law state. But he pointed out that if you're speaking precisely and technically, I'm going to quote him quickly here, accurate analysis should reserve the use of the word property for the designation of rights that persons have with respect to things. In other words, what he means is that technically speaking, we'll say that, you know, this watch is my property. What we mean by that is I have a property right in the watch. Technically speaking, the thing that is owned is not property. I have a property right in the watch. The reason the word came about is just Latin. Appropriate is something that's your own. Or you can think of the word property as it's a property of something, like a balloon has a certain property, a car has a certain property, the sun has certain properties or attributes or features. And property helps us extend our influence into the world. Things help us extend our influence into the world. So they become properties of us. And so we tend to say property. So I slip up from time to time. Everyone does this in natural language, but it is important to keep that in mind in certain cases when disingenuous arguments are used, especially for intellectual property, which I'll get to if I have time. So property really means the property right. So the right way to say it, if you're thinking precisely, would be I'm a human being, I'm an actor, I have an ownership right in a thing. I have a property right in a thing. I'm the owner of that thing. The thing is the thing that is owned that I have a property right in. Even though we casually sometimes say, that thing is my property, or it is property. Okay. So in addition to the clarifying idea of Rothbard that all human rights are property rights, another thing that we need to keep in mind is the importance of the concept of scarcity because it helps explain the nature and function of property rights and how they arose. This was emphasized even by David Hume and Hans-Therman Hoppe, a recent and current Austro-Anarchist, Rothbardian, Misesian scholar, has emphasized scarcity as well and has treated us a theory of socialism and capitalism, especially the very first two, very short chapters, one and two, points out that the purpose of property rights is a solution to the problem of scarcity, which leads to the problem of interpersonal conflict. This is also recognized just by the sort of common sense aspect of Mises' Austrian economics view of the world, his theory of praxeology, which I won't get into in too much detail, but that's his logic of human action. Basically, Mises points out that if you look at the structure of action, that is what we do. We basically employ scarce resources, or means, he called them means of action, things in the world outside of our bodies and we use them to achieve ends in the future. This is what humans do in every moment of their lives, every action. We also employ knowledge that guides what we do. If we didn't have any knowledge we wouldn't act, we wouldn't be a sentient humans, we wouldn't be aware of a problem in the future that we want to change, we wouldn't be aware of the causal properties of the world and know how to change things, we wouldn't be aware of what means were available or scarce resources that we could use as tools to interfere. So all human action, all successful human action is aimed at changing something in the future, something that you would prefer to happen that is not going to happen unless you interfere and you do that by using a means or using a resource, that is employing a resource, using a tool and using your knowledge to decide what to do. Very simple. And of course in economics, if you achieve what you wanted to achieve, that's called a profit. It doesn't have to be a monetary profit, it could be what we call a psychic profit. Otherwise you have a loss. So the goal of human life is to have successful action. That is to achieve our ends. And we do this by using resources, I'm not going to call it property. Now this is true of people by themselves, like Robinson Crusoe alone on this island, alone in the world. He acts, he still has to use knowledge about the way things are, he has to interfere in reality and he has to employ things, employ resources to get things done, make a fishing net to catch fish, etc. But we don't live alone, we live with other humans and this gives us an immense advantage of two advantages. Number one, we get to live with other people and we're social animals and that allows us to trade and over time that allows us to have a division of labor and the specialization of labor which makes all of our actions more efficient. It also alienates us from our labor and makes us hate the world according to Marx but some of us actually like our jobs. Actually I only had an also skip that. But that's a political issue. It also gives us a transmission of knowledge from the generations and that knowledge accumulates over time. It's like a fund, I think Hayek called it a wealth or a fund which is, I think the reason the world keeps getting wealthier. Not only because there's more people all the time which helps us with the division of labor but because we accumulate scientific, technical, engineering and causal knowledge with every generation and that gives us more recipes, more knowledge. So you see human action as two parts using these scarce things in the world as means of action and using knowledge about what to do with it. And the knowledge is always increasing. This is why knowledge is so important. This is one of the reasons I hate intellectual property because it impedes the spread of knowledge. So you could say heaven is other people. It's good that we live in society, right? It makes us all richer. But it comes with the risk and the risk is conflict. Crusoe on the island can build his little hut and make his nets and no one's going to steal it. He has to deal with the risks of the world and all the natural elements but there's no criminals around. There's no one to trade with but there's also no criminals. So we have the possibility of trading with other people and benefiting from that and living in society but we have the risk of conflict. And the reason we have the risk of conflict is because there's scarcity in the world. That means there are certain resources that are the type of things that can only be used by one person at a time. Only Crusoe can use that fishing net to catch the fish. If someone takes it from him, he doesn't have it anymore. So these are the types of things. This is why they're called scarce. So scarcity, which is the natural world that we live in, combined with society gives rise to the possibility of conflict. So the fact that we need to use these resources to have successful action and the possibility of conflict which comes about when we live in society, this gives rise to the need for property rights. This is why property rights arise. This is why we have rights at all. So the whole function of property rights is to permit, not to guarantee, but to permit to make it at least possible, the conflict-free use of resources in a social context. And liberty, we can think of liberty, the libertarians believe in as the freedom to use resources without interference from other people. So that's why property rights are linked with liberty. So how do we do this? How do we do this successfully? What makes libertarianism unique, by the way? So I'm going to kind of summarize the structure of property rights, how they arise. This is actually roughly consistent with the way the common law and the civil law and customary law throughout time has done it because there's really no other way to do it successfully. They haven't done it fully consistently and you can think of libertarians as being the group that is most consistent about this kind of approach. So to successfully come up with a system of property rights that are just and that work to perform their function, of permitting conflict-free use of resources, they have to be assigned or allocated, we have to determine who owners are, in a natural and a fair way. So the first thing is we're trying to come up with rules that allows everyone to live their lives. So the baseline thing is to recognize the independence of every person. So that's where self-ownership comes from and I'll get to that in a minute. And it also has to permit people to use resources. We have to be free to go into the world and use things and a lot of things were never used before. They were unowned in the state of nature. Someone's got to be the first one to use a resource. So there has to be, these property rules have to recognize the right of people to use things first. That's where homesteading or original appropriation comes from which I'll get to again in a second. And it also has to have a permanence about it. When someone is recognized as the owner of a resource, they have to remain the owner. You can't change it from one moment to the other. If someone steals my property and then it becomes theirs, then that means we don't have property rights at all. So we're back to the pre-law world of violence and interpersonal violence or conflict as the norm instead of having a system of rules that permit the conflict-free use of resources. If resources can be taken, there are no property rights. So it has to allow resource to be kept by the owner until they give it away consensually or voluntarily. This is where contract comes from. Okay. All right. So this results in a few basic property rules. And again, this is basically the structure of the common law, but this is a more consistent and a simplified version of it. So the rules of libertarianism, you could say. First of all, we treat human bodies differently than other resources. And the reason is because we are our bodies and you can't imagine a human actor without a body. We don't consider bodies. We are our bodies. Whether we have a soul or not, you don't have to get metaphysical. You don't have to dismiss religion or adopt religion to believe in this. We're just talking about, for this physical body, who is the owner, which means who has the legally recognized or the socially recognized right to control it. And the answer is the person himself, or at least the default rule, which means there's no slavery, right? In other words, people don't own other people. They own themselves. So the first property rule is just self, you can call it self-ownership. It's more precise to call it body ownership because I don't really know what the self is. I don't know how much it weighs or where its limits are, but I do know what the body is. Now, for external resources, these are other things that humans acquire in the world. They pluck from nature to use as tools. We can determine the owner of a resource whenever there's a dispute, and that's the only time we ever need to determine ownership in the first place, is in the case of a dispute. By three simple principles. The first is original appropriation or homesteading. That's who had it first. We ask that question. And again, remember earlier, we have to have that rule because otherwise we wouldn't be able to use things in the first place. Someone has to be able to use it first. Contractual exchange, that is, did the owner of it give it to someone else by gift or by sale, in which case it's owned now by the other person, not the original homesteader? And then you can think of a third category of rectification, which means we can determine who owns a resource in the case of the necessity or restitution if one person acts so as to harm another person, trespasses against them, commits a crime. Then they owe compensation to that person. So to compensate the victim, some of his resources may need to be taken. So that would be another type of exchange. And then of course I have abandon and listen here. If you own a resource and then you abandon it somehow, then the resource sort of rejoins the commons and can be rehomesteaded by someone new. So those principles, all you really need to do is ask those questions to determine who owns a resource. And what law is, is law is just a detailed working out over time of practical rules to implement these principles, to apply them. As Frederick Bastiat, the famous libertarian French economist and writer said, property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property. And I think what he meant by that was laws are really just the embodiment of property rights. Law really are just property rights. So without scarcity of the world and the possibility of conflict, there would be no need for property rules or laws. Now, I want you to notice something. The typical argument used by libertarians is really the Lockean argument. Now that argument goes like this. And remember Locke was responding to a gun in film or Locke was trying to avoid the divine right of kings. He was trying to show why humans can own property, have property rights, that is, not as a gift from the kings, but as sovereign people. So he had an argument sort of like this. He had to rest it upon the religious views of the time and maybe he even held them, I don't know. But the argument is that God created the universe, including the earth. And he gave the earth to man by giving it to Adam and Eve. And of course, the divine right of kings' idea is that Adam was the owner of the whole world and that everyone descended from him and so the monarchs and the kings that came after him sort of had this title, this divine right to everything. So everyone else is a feudal position in respect to them. But Locke said, no, God gave the right to the world to people in commons, which really means it was sort of unowned and a big resource waiting for people to use. And he gave every person ownership of himself, so the self-ownership idea, which is pretty unobjectionable as far as it goes. But then he started using this more metaphorical language, more common and the older times, like the idea that if you own yourself, you own your labor, right? You hear libertarians say this all the time, probably a lot of you think you believe this. And if you own your labor, then you own things you mix with it. And that's how he made his homesteading argument, which I made earlier. And if you notice, the way I described it, I never once mentioned labor or the right to own your labor. It's one reason I scared clear of the right to own yourself. All we need to say is you own your body and there are different rules for requiring these things. Now it is true that the act of homesteading, right, we said that you have to have the right to initially appropriate things that have not been used by other people. You can view that as a type of mixing of labor, because what you're doing is you're plucking this thing out from the world and you're using it in such a way that people can see that. There's what the Kantians like Hoppe would say an intersubjectively ascertainable link, or what we would say is an objective link, a visible link. This is where the idea of property and borders or boundaries comes in. Should say borders and can upset some people. Boundaries. It's a sign, basically, telling people I have now used this. There's basically a link between me and this resource. And if there's a dispute over that resource later, we can point to that link to determine who the owner is. That's how we do it. So it is true that by mixing your labor, so to speak, with a resource, that's one way of bordering or putting a boundary up around the resource and thereby establishing a publicly visible connection between you and that resource. It's not an unknown thing right for homesteading by others. Now it's been plucked out of the state of nature and it's now a thing owned by a human. Now it's subject to his control and he or she can sell it or give it to others or trade or loan it to others, but it's his now, right? But you don't need to say you own your labor to do that. In fact, you don't own your labor. Economically, the concept of labor arose as distinct from leisure. So the idea is that the general idea is action. We act, we do things. You can think of labor and leisure as two ways of conceptually describing action. Action can either be labor or can be leisure. All that means is the purpose of your action is to achieve some other end down the road and you do something you don't really particularly like right now. It's called labor, something that has so-called disutility. Or you do something for its own sake, something for its own consumption or enjoyment. That's called leisure. They're basically both just actions. So you might as well say that you own your actions, which would be nonsensical, which is what people say you own your labor because it doesn't sound as obviously false. Economically, Adam Smith and these guys, they started to understand that when you labor upon something, you put your mental effort and your physical effort into transforming resources. This creates wealth in the world. It creates value. And so people see economically a connection between why people prosper and their action and their wealth, I'm sorry, their labor, which is true. And so they start thinking that, you know, your labor kind of goes into these things. Sound familiar? I don't remember marks. Like occasional cortex has, right? In case someone listens to this speech in 30 years, I'm talking about the Dead Sea Congresswoman from New York. Something I can't remember first. Something Otaizia Cortes. Anyway, so this has been a big mistake. It has led to, I don't know, its property views, I believe. It's derailed all of political philosophy. I think Locke made a huge, huge mistake and everyone repeats it now, including people like Alambo's, Lysander Spooner, by the way, was absolutely horrible in intellectual property because of this. So was I and Rand. They all have this view that, hey, if you create something, you own it. So they've totally, you notice, I didn't mention labor earlier, I also didn't mention creation because creation isn't actually not a source of ownership. This is one mistake even libertarians make. Creation is a source of wealth. It's not a source of ownership. Let me explain why. Ownership of a resource, remember, the only time we have to ask ownership is when there's an actual dispute between two real people. They both claim a thing, they claim the right to control that thing and we apply those basic principles. Who had it first? Did someone sell it by contract? Does someone owe someone some recompense for some kind of crime they committed? You ask those questions and that will answer the question of who owns the resource. So basically the way to get title to a thing is either to be the first one to use it, that's homesteading, or to get it by contract from someone else. That's basically it. There's no creation about it. What creation means is transforming an existing physical thing into another physical shape or rearrangement with your labor, with your effort, with your intelligence. Yes. If I take some wood, if I take a hunk of marble and I carve it into a statue, that's a nice statue. Now I have increased my wealth and the sum total of wealth in the world. But I did it because I own the marble already. I'm just transforming the marble. And if I'm working on a statue that someone else owns at their request, I don't own it. So my labor doesn't give rise to property rights. If I already own the marble, I own it after I reshape it. If I didn't own the marble, I don't own it even though I labored upon it. So labor is a source of wealth. That is true. That means it makes the things you own more valuable. But it doesn't give rise to property rights. And finally, let me say this. I'm going to stop shortly. I have time for Q&A, but I'm going to point a couple things out. You'll notice when people talk about intellectual property, they're kind of confused when you say there's no intellectual property rights. They'll say, well, I came up with that idea. I created it. Well, it's irrelevant. Creation is not a source of property. And then they'll say, are you saying ideas aren't property? You see, that's not the question. That's why I clarified property. The question is never, is that chair property? The question is always when two people want that same chair, who owns it? Who has a property right in it? The question is not, is the chair property? We know the chair is the thing that exists and that people can dispute because they're actually having to dispute over it. Ideas are not the same thing. We can both have the scheme for making a chair in our heads and use that at the same time to make our own chairs with our own wood. So ideas are simply not rivalrous or scarce things. This is why they're not the types of things that can be owned. Okay, so I'm going to... And I said I wasn't going to talk about intellectual property. I can't help it. I keep pulling me back in. I'll just mention one thing. I don't have time to go through all this. I've talked about this in some of my writings in some other podcasts. But this clarified way of looking at property helps to answer and clarify lots of other issues that libertarians also mess up. Not on purpose, but just because it's confusing. It helps clarify the nature of contract. It's simply the transfer of ownership of a thing by someone to someone else. Also fraud. You know, a lot of times people will say, well, that should be illegal because it was fraudulent. And they just mean it was dishonest. Like if you plagiarize a paper at a school or if you lie about the fact that you had breast surgery or something like that. On a profile. Fraud can now be seen as the theft of an owned object without the permission of the owner because deception was involved, which makes his consent not informed consent in a sense. It's a taking by trick. It's actually called in the common law. So that's what fraud is. Fraud is not just being dishonest. It also explains the inalienability argument about whether we can sell ourselves into slavery. If you understand that rights in our bodies do not come about because of contract or even because of homesteading, then there's no argument that you can sell yourself into slavery because selling a thing is for these external things that we acquire. The reason I mentioned abandonment is you can think of a sale as the type of undoing of an acquisition. I acquire an object by homesteading it or by contract and then I basically give it to someone else and I abandon it in their favor. So now they re-homestead it and they have it. So you can do these little tricks and end up with contract, the right to sell things. The right to sell is not a natural right. It's just an implication of owning things that you acquired. You can just unacquire them. But you never acquired your body. Your body goes along with you inextricably. So that solves inalienability. A slavery contract would be invalid according to this and I've written on this. A few other issues that you can solve I think with this view of property rights. A concept called allodialism which you'll hear a lot of libertarian some cranks bring up. An idea of easements and an explanation of how restrictive covenants work and why they work. So I'll pause here and I welcome any questions. Thank you. So everything you say sounds great if we were starting a new society from scratch on an unenouted planet that had no history. And here I heard in which the current institution of property is not determined by an actual and fair acquisition or a series of unbroken voluntary exchanges throughout time. What did you do with the current system? Right. And I've got some blog posts on this too. I'm going to podcast this later on my websites. I'll put some links to some writings I've done on this topic before. The basic answer is you don't have to trace title all the way back to Adam to prove your ownership of it which is not implied by anything I said. You just look at these three principles. What the law has done in which I think is what a libertarian law would do too is the law traces title between remember every property right arises when we think about who would win a dispute between people that could dispute the thing. So when you have two or more disputants or contestants what you do is you trace their title back to a common ancestor. So if they all agree that the land was owned by Farmer Jones 175 years ago we don't care where the Farmer Jones himself stole the land or got it from someone else because they all are saying that's where their property comes from. So we look at what did Farmer Jones do with it which one has a better title going back to the common ancestor. And Rothbard writes about this too. The basic idea is that anyone who currently possesses a resource and they're using it peacefully and that themselves didn't steal it from someone else we would just recognize that they have the title going forward. Well it seems that that's a very convenient arbitrary place to draw a line that benefits the current owners of property and completely ignores indigenous populations or the descendants of people who were enslaved and who were forced to create wealth for other people and have never been compensated for any of that. I actually believe that if a given living person can trace title better than the current owner or legal owner of a resource they should get it back. It's just very difficult to do. This is one of the reasons statues of limitations arise partly because as we go further back in time evidence gets shakeier there's no witnesses around anymore but I think in some cases if a given person, a slave or an indigenous person can show that a particular piece of land was taken from their ancestor I do think they should get it back. And I've written that too. I just don't think it's really hard and by the way in other cases quite often the owner the previous owner who the property was taken from was already compensated. So when the US government or states take property from people based on eminent domain they pay them for that using tax dollars. So I would say that in those cases the quote-unquote real owner is not the original person who had it taken because they've already been compensated it's the taxpayers. So like you could say the roads ought to be owned but I think the roads the natural owners of the roads or the taxpayers the current citizens who had to be extorted to pay for it not the person whose land was taken to make the road because they were already compensated but making the world hold is difficult. Alright, sure. So you talked a little bit about how you don't believe that anyone can rightly sell themselves into slavery. So I want to explore that a little bit more. Very quickly, are you familiar with Robert Nozick's A Tale of a Slave? I've probably read it but I don't know. He goes through several steps. You're a slave the slave owner decides to let you have a couple days on your own and then you get to vote on certain steps and then at the end he says at what point did this become anything other than The Tale of a Slave? So that sort of thought at what point after you contract your labor to someone, are you three-sevenths of a slave? Are you a full slave? Are you not a slave? If you are contracting your labor to someone else but you are not selling yourself into slavery? Yeah, and I've dealt with this too I think this is another confusion. To understand, to answer this question you have to have a theory of contract and I've written a theory of contract in 1996 based on Barton Rothbard and Williamson Evers' work but you view contract as I said a contract is just the sale or the transfer of ownership of an owned thing by the owner to someone else. Labor is not an owned thing so labor contracts are not the sale of labor technically speaking. In economic terms you can view them that way but legally it's not. The way to view that I believe is simply if I'm an employee of someone we have a contract for the money owned by the employer and the contract is a conditional contract if I perform certain actions that you want me to perform then some of your property becomes mine. So the contract is really a one-way contract for the alienable property owned by the employer it's not really a sale of yourself it's just an action you're performing so I think that you have to have a theory of contract and one more point contracts should not be viewed as binding promises Again, you'll notice I used the Rothbard idea that a contract is the transfer of ownership of a resource to someone else that's all they are. They are thought in the law and conventionally as a binding promise and if you believe they're binding promises then the next thing is well if I promise to be a slave why isn't that binding and then you get into all these difficulties. If you view them as just a transfer of ownership to a resource that you own then you never even get to that question. So if I promise to be your slave promises are not legally binding I can't sell myself to you because I don't own myself in the sense that I acquired myself like I can abandon myself. Anyway I deal with that at length in my 96th article. Can you talk a little bit more about the concept of a ban I guess the perpetuity of ownership so if use is so important in establishing an ownership claim how is it that then someone can just let's say use a land they farm it once and then they let it be free from and they're pledging in why shouldn't that at some point become available again for homesteaders. In the law the law deals with this with what's called liberative prescription or acquisitive prescription which in the common law is the statute of limitations I don't believe in the law, I don't believe in the government or legislators so I don't believe in statutes per se but the principle behind that makes sense. I do believe that there's something in Roman law called an international law called the swiatude. Basically you try to homestead a huge tract of land and you keep it productively in use you're going to have resources that allow you to police it and if someone squats on it you're going to evict them and you would have resources to do that but if you have a million acres and you just don't even police it you're just letting it lie fallow and some people start living on it over time you can be held to have abandoned it and favor them because you just took no action to stop them so and if you're not using it you're not going to have resources to police it anyway or natural limits to how much you can I don't think that means that if you're not using a resource that you lose the rights to it like a lot of mutualists believe I think the mutualists are wrong about that that said, if you don't use your property for too long and you don't police it and you don't have enough ability or wherewithal to prevent people from using it over time they will be seen as the new owners. You'll be seen as having abandoned it and they have rehomesteaded it Okay, thank you very much How's that for timing?


And so with the interview's presentation as sort of an introduction to the whole session with the outlining of some of the theoretical goals that we wish to shoot towards, we're now going to switch gears a little bit and take a more chronological perspective through time, starting with the Lord Paleolithic and ending in the Holocene. And the first one of these talks is by Akash Srinivas, and take your way. Thank you. Good afternoon everybody. I'll be looking at more technologies in both Western Europe and South Asia and looking at how variability can be assessed through expanding criteria. So for example, as Dr. Berg pointed out, we have various approaches to lithic analysis. Each have their own set of parameters, classifications and technological attributions. And for the longest time until recently, and in the case of South Asia, even in the present, they still, we still apply typological criteria such as the presence or absence of handaxes, LCTs or even the quantities of retouched flake elements in technological attribution. And also another point which Dr. Berg emphasized is that it's impossible to take terminologies we find in say a typological paradigm and approach it and apply it on a technological paradigm. So in order to, how do you say, get over these biases which unfortunately underestimate variability in assemblages because unfortunately we don't have the toolkit to look at variability in lithic assemblages on different resolutions. We are within the site, between sites, between regions or through time and also functions and the most controversial bit culture. So I will touch upon this in the discussion, but also in order to get through all of these, I decided to look at two assemblages, one from Western Europe, that's Isenia La Peneta and one from South Asia, that's Madhya Pipriya and both of these were selected because they are controversial in their technological attributions. So with regards to Isenia, I think some of you might be familiar with it because discovered in 1978 during the construction of the Napoli-Vastro Highway and because identified as a paleontological site and assigned the Isenia La Peneta final unit, it's located in the afterworld basin and the site is located in Quaternary Alluvium with intercalated tufts and Travertine which is the bedrock. Recent dates up to the entire unit three which is the archaeological layer at around 586,000 and those who have applied a more morphological or technological approach have assigned the mode one classification because of the absence of LCTs as well as the low incidences of retouched flake tools, but with expanding criterion using technological chain of pre-war analysis as well as behavioral traits, other workers have called it a mode two assemblages. With regards to Madhya Pipriya, it was discovered in 1961 by Dr. Fathri during his doctoral dissertation pre-work and it's located in the central Namada valley. It's a few kilometers upstream of Hathnora which is the site of the only hominid fossil in the subcontinent of the Pleistocene and it's located in a setting where it's mostly a shulian or mode two techno complexes. It's an open air site in a cemented gravel conglomerate on the left bank of the river which means it is primarily a secondary context site Unfortunately there are no dates, we absolute or relative so that's something we need to address. Fathri who did the initial work classified it as a Mahadevian industry and called it a pebble tool complex, pebble tool and flake which can be equated to a mode one technology because in this time period you have multiple uses of multiple terminologies. You have the European terminology of lower, middle and upper paleolithic as well as the African terminology of early stone age, middle stone age, late stone age as well as indigenous applications of something called the series one, series two as well as cultural norm increases like Mahadevian for the lower paleolithic or Nevasian for the middle paleolithic. So there is no standardization in terminology which is something we are addressing currently in the subcontinent and in 63 and 65 another doctoral candidate, Supeker during conducted excavations at this site he said it's a mixed assemblage comprising of three different traditions although it's coming from the same stratification the criteria he used was typological. So he said all the pebble codes and flakes belong to a chopper chopping tradition all the bi-faces belong to a national tradition and those that were you know on silica material was a middle stone age element. So this kind of classification is problematic so that's one of the reasons why we went to Mahadev because this most people who work in South Asia assume that this is one of the classic mode one sites in the subcontinent which might not be true. So the methods applied primarily is lithic analysis looking at 704 artifacts from unit 369 of Hisarnia only the flint elements as well as 121 elements from Mahadev Pipriya the discrepancy I'll get to in the next slide. Data collection included traditional flake and core attribution flake and core measurements and analyzed using technological chain of regard statistical and you know attribution following these parameters. So for Hisarnia and Mahadev Pipriya I used Varsky, Galopya Pareto and Mosquera which is a European standardized terminal comparative database so as not to you know regionally or make it Eurocentric in terms of the Indian assemblies I also applied Clark and Klanda for AFRAM Africa and Shea is more that terminology from the Middle East. So with regards to distribution in Hisarnia we can see that around 139 elements are core elements around 1100 are flake elements and you also have napto class and debris. One interesting find is the fact that we could identify the first evidence of fasunash on flint at the site. With regards to the collections distribution of collections from Mahadev Pipriya three collections were looked at the original Kathri collection of which only half of it could be recovered. There's a more recent Patnaik collection also from surface. So Kathri and Patnaik collections were from the surface and the Patnaik collection was done in late 2000s. The Supacal collection is from both excavated context I told you excavation 63 and 65 as well as surface collections unfortunately when we visited the repository out of the 1300 artifacts only 78 could be recovered nobody knows where the rest are and the 78 were fortunately recovered because they were in another site not even label Mahadev Pipriya. So that's why we have this giant discrepancy and unfortunately that is going to bias this study so I will deal with that too. So going back to Supacal's thesis this is the distribution of the artifacts out of the 1300 artifacts 860 and what he assigned to the early stone age. Again this is because he separated quartzite materials from silicate materials and considered everything to be from quartzite to be early stone age and those that are from chert or other silicate as middle stone age which is problematic. So we have LCTs as well as other core tools as well as flake and core components and reconstructing the I mean sorry characterizing the nature of the lithic assemblage at Isernia focusing on the flint material it's locally available in three phases one is affinitic without any micro crystals in it then we have microbraciated and microbraciated. We see there's a bit of selection towards affinitic and microbraciated varieties over the microbraciated varieties and the blanks are usually tabular and tabular slabs because the nature of the cleavage of the raw material ensures that it breaks down in that form. Surface is patinated with some evidence of aberration and as I previously stated the distribution includes a coarse flake, debris, natural glass and one shaped artifact. Two techniques of percussion were noted a direct handle percussion as well as bipolar and anal percussion and three methods of flaking were identified the dominant being the opportunistic followed by the centripetal and then the discord. With regards to the bipolar and anal percussion it is applied in two stages either as the primary technique as in the case of this core wherein the core blank is exploited only using the bipolar and anal technique or as the secondary technique wherein a core is previously exploited using some other strategy in this case unidirectional longitudinal and later in the final stage before discard it is subjected to bipolar and anvil. It is interpreted as means of trying to maximize raw material exploitation from the port blank. Like I said there's one reported or confirmed evidence of fasteners and flint. It doesn't look beautiful it doesn't look pretty but there is bifacial removal on an aphoritic slab and this is the largest class in the entire assemblage. It's almost two times bigger than the other class in the assemblage and this is very similar to some of the bifasals found in Guadassan, Nicola which is a Mo2 site in the vicinity. Also to ensure that it's not a core or it could be a core that's also used we took it to microscopic analysis and found three zones of utilization which Dr. Gabriel Baruti who's a microscopic expert in Ferrara he said is indicative of anthropogenic use, intentional anthropogenic use. With Isernia you also have another sequence using limestone which is also locally available mostly again as blocks because it's coming from the bedrock and again it's patinated and this includes only coarse flakes, coarse tools and debris so there are no fasteners in this and it's only exploited using a direct hard armor percussion and only with opportunistic method. With Mother Pipria we see that it's coarse grained quartzite, coarse and medium grained quartzite as well as cryptocrystalline silicates which is locally available from the stream bed. That's the dominant blank morphology and there is evidence of rolling as well as calculation on the artifacts. It's coarse flakes, coarse tools and bifaces are what the fasteners is composed of and it also indicates two techniques of percussion and three methods of flaking with the opportunistic being the most dominant followed by the discord and finally the centripetal. Here too the bipolar anvil is applied in two forms, in forms of cobble opening wherein the pebbles and cobbles are smashed open to access a platform and also in terms of flaking it for depth touch. This is some bifaces, you have a cleaver that's eight and two crude bifaces or two bifaces made from cobbles from the side. So the reconstructed reduction sequence at Isernia is that you have the angular class which are used as cores subjected to two forms of percussion to get flakes some of which are retouched some of which are utilized. Both the cores and the angular class were sometimes affected to retouch secondary flaking or utilization as co-tools and with one example of biface. The waste resulting from the entire sequence was sometimes utilized which somewhat mirrors mother pipria wherein you have water wound pebbles which are either selected for a natural breakage or subjected to bipolar and anvil to split the cobble which serves as a course which is then subjected to two forms of percussion to get flakes which is retouched or utilized. We have both the cobbles themselves as well as the cores after splitting that are subjected to work further work before used as co-tools or bifacially shaped as bifaces. Again waste recovered is sometimes utilized. So we see that law material for both the cases are available locally and there is some selection criteria that's applied. The bipolar angle was highlighted because according to Barsky it's something that is an innovative technological adaptation to deal with region specific external impact factors. The quality of raw material in case of Isernia and the class size in case of mother pipria. So cores are exploited minimalistically with minimal core preparation and also I mean few removals. There is also evidence of core management because of discord and centripetal cores and it's primarily given towards flake plant production. Flakes are retouched using multiple strategies and with evidence of secondary working both on flakes as cores as well as blank for flake tools and there is evidence of fashion. So applying the European criteria we see that similarities between both Isernia and mother pipria in terms of muskera, garotipaiso and Barsky indicating that it is most probably a mode 2 assemblage technocomplex using clark and paradise for mother pipria also similar mode 2 description and following shea is also mode 2. So in conclusion we can say that there is mode 2 in both mother pipria as well as Isernia which is similar to other sites in the region and elsewhere and technological variability within the mode 2 encompasses a wide range including assemblages that could pass off as mode 1 criterion if simple criterion such as presence, absence of bi-faces and LCTs are recorded. So intracite variability as we know in sites such as notarkirico and gaunatila rago where we have layers without bi-faces with sandwich between layers with bi-faces is one kind of variability and sites such as both Isernia and mother pipria in the region you have mode 2 but in that specific site you don't have a distinct mode 2 element space I mean it compares mode 2 technocomplex range all over Eurasia and Africa so that's a lot of space and time which covers so that also would lead to some kind of variability which needs to be addressed and in terms of function we know with regards to the function and hierarchy of the sites the kind of two assemblages would vary so we also need to look at the functional hierarchy of the site before ascribing technological variability and once we can negate all of this there's also the what if of cultural variability which is difficult to quantify but might have played a role so that's why we need to consider and expand various criterion including behavior and also site formation because that would bias the assemblage itself in the case of South Asia unfortunately site formation process is not exploited or used primarily so that's something that we need to address and we need to revisit previous collections because times change paradigms change and we need to update and in the case of mother pipria we are currently working on a project to get a more reliable dataset from primary collections and also excavations and then we'll know for sure if it is mode 2 or not I'd like to thank everybody who's here and all of the people on the slide for giving me access and the institution for giving me access to the lithic assemblages and thank you


I'm not exactly very quoteable, but I will say it. You see, in my village, there's a saying that says that if you never travel, you'll always think that your mother's cooking is the best cooking. And so what I feel like Wadamaya does is as you travel, you're getting into the kitchens of other mothers and really helping people everywhere in Africa really getting to realize that there's some different ways of cooking that they could actually, that within reach for them, that they could make better dishes and possibly better lives for themselves. And so your travel bro is a blessing, not just for yourself, but for a lot of people who probably you never know about. See, I never knew I got so many people that watches me from a loud. You do. See, one. You do have a lot of people in. That's him. And that's the biggest fan.  The biggest fan. Probably he's the biggest fan in Malawi. Fan, fan, fan, fan, fan.


Hi, I'm Karen Wilkinson and I direct the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. I'm excited to be part of the K-12 online conference this year and wanted to extend a special thanks to Susan Van Gelder for the invitation to talk with you. Susan and I go way back to an early NSF project that we participated in called PI, Playful Invention and Exploration. And I've been thinking about STEM and STEAM, rich learning opportunities ever since. Today is a nice occasion for me to kind of reflect back on that time and also think about the relevance in the work that I do today out of the Tinkering Studio. So I'll get keynote started and we'll get going. So for my talk today and in thinking about the possibilities for STEM rich learning, I'm really going to emphasize making, tinkering and design and design thinking. Making really makes a lot of sense for me in museums personally. And I actually feel the same way about tinkering and design. And I think they even make a lot of sense in schools or at least I'd like to imagine a case where they did. Before coming to the Exploratorium, I was really fortunate enough to work at a museum that had a partnership with a K6 school, the Science Museum of Minnesota. So I got to work really closely both in a formal and informal educational setting and that really shaped the way I think about the possibilities for education. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the work at the Exploratorium since making and tinkering and design are really a part of what we do in the tinkering studio there. And although I do see a difference between those words, there are some kind of subtle nuances and less so. But for today, I think you can think of them interchangeably as I use them. I probably will default back to tinkering quite a bit. I'm particularly fond of that one being that we just published a book earlier this year called The Art of Tinkering that really focused on the artist, scientist, and educators that have come in residence with us and done things with us in the tinkering studio. But we have this dedicated space on the floor of the Exploratorium where the goal is really about getting people to slow down and offer them an opportunity to interact with scientific and artistic phenomena and really author an idea. We're really interested in developing agency with your interactions with these things and the opportunity to really think with your hands and engage with materials. So the further you move into the tinkering studio space, the more you're able to do this in a deeper and richer way in terms of working with looser parts and more variables. I will want to point out up in that upper right hand image that there's the shop, the machine shop of the Exploratorium. It's a space that really is about the heart of the place and how I was really first introduced to tinkering after arriving there. You have exhibit developers that are in the pursuit of creating exhibits that are going to be out on the floor for visitors and I got to see them really focusing on engaging very directly with this phenomena and that was really the driving force behind our work with the tinkering studio. We wanted to give visitors an opportunity to have that kind of direct experience and closely or as closely match it to that developmental process as we could in a workshop setting. So at the museum we really see STEM as a means, not an end, and we're really trying to keep the focus strongly on the phenomena or the driving ideas and then really trying to work with and mind them to their fullest potential. So another thing you see a lot in the work here is really disciplinary boundaries get blurred. They automatically do that and we really feel like when it comes to making and tinkering this is a strength of that work. To us tinkering really is a serious endeavor and a valid way to go about investigating the world and I think more than anything it's a mindset but it also gives you this kind of valuable way to really draw heavily on those 21st century skills and competencies that we're hearing so much about in educational circles. In student-centered or maker-centered learning you're engaging in developing those skills naturally as a part of whatever it is that you're doing involving kind of problem-solving communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, all those things but in a way that's really authentic to the student and the projects at hand. This way of approaching I think is, approaching it is really, it's a game-changer in my mind if we can figure out the right ways to do it and I'm not saying we always do get it right in museums and in classrooms I feel like we're all going to be more engaged. The students and the adults in the scenario whether it's teachers or parents or administrators or visitors or whatever I feel like it's highly motivational this kind of work and the engagement is really apparent and I think I'm not going to really emphasize in my talk so much the work at the Exploratorium. What I'd like to do is zoom up a little and consider making kind of from the 30,000 foot level and I think both for informal and formal educational settings I'm particularly interested in kind of the promises and possibilities of maker-centered learning and see it as this potentially incredible unifier for schools and out-of-school learning and I think we each have a lot to offer one another in terms of this dialogue and development and I think with the interest in the maker movement one thing to really consider is that it really draws on a really rich tradition of thinkers who emphasize the importance of playful and direct modes of inquiry. Educators like John Dewey and Maria Montessori and Larisse Maliguzzi but for me particularly this connection to Seymour Papert is a strong one because it was his idea to kind of twist the word constructivist into constructionist philosophy through his work with Piaget as a student but by really saying it's more than just knowledge being transmitted from teacher to learner as educators we really know this that it's actively constructed in the mind of the learner but his assertion was it went a little bit further than that and saying that when you're really actively involved in constructing a physical object having an idea and bringing that idea into a physical or digital form something tangible that's when something really profound happens and I think this type of knowledge or experience is often more durable than kind of traditional or rote ways of learning and I think now more than ever to be able to come up with ideas based on interacting with stuff direct experience with materials kind of posing problems based on what you see happening and then going about constructing solutions to those problems I think it's a really exciting proposition and I think you know Papert's work and then also someone who worked really closely with Seymour is Mitch Resnick at the Media Lab and he has a lovely quote that I really like to use where it talks about really students being confronted with kind of having to come up with creative solutions to unexpected problems so you know it's not just about how much you know or what you know but really on your ability to think and act creatively that's what we're really going to be faced with in terms of you know development of career based work but I would also argue just sort of lifelong humanistic based work. I think having learner centered maker centered education could really go a long way in helping us get at some of these 21st century skills. I think this call for thinking and acting creatively is kind of one of the key components of maker centered education because it involves this active doing you know this we talk about it in the tinkering studio is thinking with your hands but it involves making stuff but beyond that it is about making stuff but I think that's where some people stop and I think for us it's really about making selves this idea of building confidence and competence and habits of iteration kind of making community and really emphasizing the importance of citizenship and collaboration. These are really our kind of at what's at the heart of the very best education and I think this development of self-efficacy and agency are really really special to the making and tinkering work as I see it. These 21st century skills and competencies that really draw on these things like the critical thinking communication cut across all disciplines and cultures and age levels and interests. It really is about seeing lots of different divergent thinking happening. It's a real strength and I think making and certainly tinkering often get dismissed as you know it's just for fun or play but it's something that we take really seriously as a learning endeavor and what people are missing is that it is that playful disposition and curiosity that or curious inquiring that's required in making and tinkering that make that connection to those 21st century skills so strong. So what I'd like to do next is just play a clip of a tinkering studio activity. It's one of our core activities that we use in training in a lot of our new facilitators and it's one that's actually pretty common to school curricula as well. We call it circuit boards but it's about batteries and bulbs and hooking things up. It's not very long. It's about two minutes and 30 seconds and what I'd like to do is just play it and I won't I won't narrate over it. I'll just let you watch it kind of take it in and then come back and talk to you again on the other side. So that was circuit boards. Nothing radically new here really it's you know in fact it actually is it was based on batteries and bulbs curricula produced in the sixties by the elementary science study. We draw a lot of inspiration from their work and if you aren't familiar with it I highly encourage you to look into ESS because they did some really incredible work. But what is new is the way we chose to present this work in the tinkering studio so that it's more open ended, has looser parts and more variables and the learners are really following what they're curious about. We did a pilot study looking at lots and lots and lots of video of people interacting in the space and the interesting thing about this pilot study was it was really intended as an opportunity for our tinkering studio staff to work with our visitor research and evaluation group. So it was a chance to work practitioners and researchers side by side and really come to develop a way of talking about this work, a shared language that made sense to both groups to really talk about and distill the types of learning that we saw happening and the dimensions of those. We ended up calling them learning dimensions and that there were, excuse me, four different categories that we ended up with engagement, intentionality and initiative, social scaffolding and the development of understanding. And those broke down in different ways but the interesting thing for us is that we've been able to use this framework as a tool in our professional development work to be able to reflect in the moment as you're going through but also step back and reflect with a group of other educators about the work that we see happening. And it's been a really invaluable experience for our team to really hone in on the ways of understanding this work, being able to facilitate more towards goals that we have for doing the work and then also sharing it more broadly. We had a workshop in September of this year where we had a number of Bay Area teachers who participated and they're very excited in actually taking this back and using the framework to look at as developing a metric for their work in the classroom as well. If you would like more information on this I can point you to two sources. One is in publication now. We wrote about it specifically in Design Make Play. It's Margaret Honey's book but ours was in chapter five. It looks like fun but are they learning? And then also do out later in December actually in science education. Bronwyn and Mike and I wrote an article with Josh from the Visitor Research and Evaluation Group. Really kind of diving in pretty deeply. It's an academic paper. It's 20 plus pages so it's not a particularly easy read but it actually goes into great detail about this work. And it can get complex really fast in terms of you know that that's really the natural tendency that people have to go in. They start with something and quickly one one idea leads to the next leads to the next leads to the next and you can literally end up finding you know a 10 year old wiring a double pole double throw switch something that I wasn't introduced to until I was the collegiate level and I'm not going to pretend that all of the people that enter into the space come away with deep understandings about a double pole double throw because they may not even choose to pick that piece up but what I do really care a lot about is that learners are able to choose how to engage with this stuff and then move through it in a way that's based on their own interest. So I think that is what connects I feel this core activity to the work of the maker movement and that is the big what's new. I think in all of this work in this Makered centered educational field what is new is the excitement that Make Magazine has generated. It really started with the publication of the magazine back in 05 and then Maker Faire started in 2006 and they have grown yearly. Interestingly the many Maker Faires are where you see the most growth and I find them to be completely charming where they're community based sometimes even school based festivals and are you know a way of involving the community and looking at making and tinkering that I particularly love. In my 20 plus years in education I've never seen something that has ignited excitement from so many different places and you know it started in popular press you had Wired Scientific American kind of talking about this this maker movement this growing movement and they really emphasized kind of on the innovation and entrepreneurial side of things and you had books come out like Chris Anderson's book that asserted that the new Industrial Revolution was making we even had a Maker Faire at the White House this year and I think as all of these things are growing in in popular culture you had this back end of education that was really thinking about this so what started with Fab Lab out of MIT you also have agency by design a new project that is out of project zero at Harvard that's really looking at and caring very deeply about Maker Center education and kind of really zeroing in on what's going on there in terms of the learning and then you had people like us with the art of tinkering and invent to learn design make play more of an interest in the educational aspect of things museums were really really rising to the occasion museums and libraries creating makerspaces and tinkering studios where people the general public was coming in and engaging in a different type of activity and you've also seen it in schools there have been many many schools and whole districts that are interested in this idea making it happen both in separate spaces within a school but also in individual classrooms so I think you know it's an interesting thing as as we gain a global perspective and the world is seemingly becoming smaller there's a funny paradox that kind of individually the worlds that we're engaged in become more numerous and complex so I think we need a structure within museums and schools that align with this paradox instead of ignoring it or even rejecting it outright a structure that really seeks to establish this broader viewpoint of what disciplines could be what learning looks like and things like that I I was introduced to this graphic years ago now but I it had a profound impact on me and it was based on Reed Stevens work looking at lifelong and life-wide learning and if you take a look at the the the graphic the blue part is what I focused on but actually from a school perspective you should look at the orange but anyway in terms of waking hours 16 waking hours of any person's day kind of looking from childhood to adulthood in retirement the orange represents time spent in formal schooling and the blue is in informal learning environments and what I found most interesting about this is the possibilities for those areas to connect and interweave really drawing on each other really thinking about there's a lot of blue and how how can those experiences within school reflecting connect to this experiences outside of school and vice versa so really thinking about going beyond what we think of as traditional schooling and and reimagine what education in this broader context could look like so this idea of kind of seeing the maker movement and and what makes it so special and how we connect could be this very notion kind of thinking of this expansive view of disciplines and makers in learning and let's really ask ourselves what is it that we're trying to offer to students or in our case visitors or even co-workers colleagues that you work with I believe there's something fundamentally human about making and tinkering and at its core it's really about relationships and educational endeavor and it's highly collaborative and I think having people coming to see themselves as relating to science to art to technology engineering and math coming to see learning anew or at least challenging some some assumptions of what counts for learning I think we really need to consider where where do we spend our attention how do we spend our attention what and what are we doing with this time both in and out of school there's a lot of conversation in museums about the desire to have this informed citizenry and a familiarity and comfort with stem should really be part of that goal to us it's about students who are able to think for themselves and learn how they learn best and feel a connection or a relationship with stem that hopefully has been enhanced by their time at museums and think of what this could mean for their time in schools as well we jokingly say around the tinkering studio that we're tinkering with tinkering and that really is our part of the investigation and thinking about you know this process in a really new way coming coming to see learning anew and really appreciating you know what the full potential for what making and learning could be I mean it's easier for me to talk about what what it isn't sometimes but I would say tinkering as a way of learning it isn't passive it's not done in isolation and it's not you know as I've said before a transmission model it's a really active pursuit trying things out doing things and building and constructing knowledge it's infinitely social and it means going out into the world kind of seeking opportunities for relevance within your school within your community within your museum but also slowing things down really allowing for time this you know and I I I'm fully aware of how difficult that that can be both in schools and in museums but it's something that's really pretty essential because making and tinkering is varied in time and place so maybe it's school but beyond school and it can occur in kind of these hybrid formats these environments that take advantage of both informal and formal learning I think it's a really rich perspective on learning that it's worth trying to figure out how to make it visible both to kind of parents in school audiences and museum and educational audiences just kind of even at large I think the emphasis being and the focus being on learning that's emerging this kind of how to hold focus on those promises and possibilities so that's the thing I would ask you to consider for your class or your school or your institution when it comes to making and tinkering are you keeping kind of the long term and short term goals in mind and really giving yourself permission to make some mistakes I think and and time I guess time to explore these ideas and allow allow them to percolate I think you know it's potentially a new process and I think having a chance or acknowledging that mistakes are going to happen you know and that maybe a classroom or your space isn't going to look exactly the way people may imagine it should look that it can be messy at times and chaotic and noisy I think there is some some risk to what what you're working with so definite time and care needs to be given to some safety but but I think not not doing it is is not the choice I guess I think for all of us to get comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable maybe not not doing the driving all the time and that some of this side-by-side learning or really even learning from the students is going to happen we were joking the other day about this idea of you know rejecting this notion of expert or expertise and really that we should be be wanting to cultivate flex expertise in terms of being more flexible in ways of thinking about how we learn something and then how we share so this one of the lovely parts about making and tinkering is that you have this movement from learner to teacher to back to learner to teacher and it just seamlessly goes back and forth that's not to say it's not difficult but finding yourself in situations where you are continually learning I I think is what has sustained my interest in it in you know over all these years one of the things that that working closely with makers and tinkers has really taught me is this idea that it's not just about focusing strictly on the content and it really really concentrating on developing though that tinkerers disposition and the skills needed to manipulate that content this is a lovely quote from the folks in the Lincoln at the Lincoln Center but it's essentially saying when all we do is focus on those on the content and not the skills to manipulate content it's that manipulating the content that I see as tinkering they suggest we're not producing scientists or artists or investigators for the 21st century if we merely cram kids full a lot of what and leave them utterly unready for what if so really if there's anything that I leave you with today it's this idea of what if like so what if we considered things in in terms of education a little bit differently really took this idea of personalized learning to heart makers-centered education is personalized and this dispositional approach that I've mentioned so much this tinkerers disposition I also think trying to see things in the broadest possible dimension thinking of it in terms that could be in terms of disciplines or contents and topics but also connections both in and out of school looking for opportunities to make things more relevant and have a richer more inclusive discussion even even seeing museums and schools as the way to make the idea of who's a maker more more broad and more inclusive I think trying to figure out ways of making all of our work more visible to the general public so people really understand what it is we're after and come to see it as a community-based endeavor not just a school one or in a museum but really think of this collectively and also that this recognition that learning isn't linear it's not it's not fixed or terminal you don't learn something and then you're done it's really a part of a lifelong process and I think also kind of hammering home this real inclusion or need for an inclusion in the arts I'm passionate about STEM but I really do believe the arts need to be a part of it I think that this this example with Grace Kim is a perfect one she's a user interface designer by day and an incredible passionate tinkerer by night working with conductive thread and LEDs and kind of Scandinavian felting techniques that she read about but I feel like it's this it's this idea that someone can come to a learning occasion in a really personal way and and make real inroads and I'll I'll end lastly with this this funny quote by Will I am that's basically saying you know back in the day people wanted to be everything from a musician to an actor an athlete but now he sees it as people are really going to want to be makers and I see that too it's really connecting with a desire to create and investigate from a really personal place and I think figuring out ways to offer opportunities for this in every educational setting imaginable is the challenge that's ahead and one that I'm really looking forward to and I hope you are too I'll leave you with one last thing so this we're offering a MOOC again this summer we did it last summer for the first time and really learned a lot and are excited to offer the opportunity once again so it's through Coursera and it's called tinkering fundamentals occurred instructionist approach to STEM learning it's open to anyone with an interest in tinkering and it runs for six weeks starting on July 22nd and if you don't have a dedicated full six weeks that you can work on it don't worry I encourage you to join anyway and do it at your own pace it's not a requirement that that you do the whole thing and I think there are real gems and tidbits that you might be interested in along the way we discussed the the learning framework that I mentioned briefly here today and there are shared readings and some other video clips kind of of us talking more in depth about the process of tinkering in the tinkering studio so I hope I hope you'll consider joining me for that and yeah I look forward to continuing this conversation in that way if you do all right thank you


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Another day's of OTA's guys brought us some really beautiful sights. This oh my gosh. This is amazing This is this isn't this is incredible I love the slo-mo right at the end to to really get that toe tap. It's turbo. I would be proud. Yeah, little toe drag swag there Jamar Chase Gosh, we also got amazing sounds though. We got to hear from a lot of stars around the league As they you know, they sort of warm up in front of the mics at OTA's we haven't heard from them in a while We got Rodgers on Tuesday and yesterday we got more quarterbacks Let's start with Lamar Jackson here after some overreactions to not being at the Ravens camp earlier this Week he was there. He talked about the importance of being there to learn the new offense We heard an exciting Lamar when it came to discussing Todd Monkin's system And he gave us a little insight into what's going to be different this year You know, let's run in and more throne. I say, you know I hear a lot of knows about throwing and stuff like this yarns to achieve and stuff But I'm not really worried about yards as much as it's about us just winning So that'll be all the winning category of anything running I go running can only take you so far, you know And I feel like with this new era of teams and offenses in the league I feel like we need that in coach Todd Monkin when I'm sitting his offense so far is looking tremendous You know, you can change things when you want to you know, you see the defense is not looking right to you Um, she's some God blicks in you might want to receive her to do something different Coach giving you the free way to do whatever you want to I Literally love everything he's saying because it's I'm you know full of myself and Narcissistic and it's exactly what I said. So he's agreeing with me completely. I have said for years Yeah, yeah, and if you want to say I've heard I've worked with a lot of people that wanted to say run the ball It's what you do. It's what you do best go and that's okay. It's not okay if you want to win a Super Bowl It's just not Lamar saying less running more throwing more downfield passing more control for Lamar That's exactly what I wanted to hear before the OC search even started Yeah, and this even goes back a couple of years because I remember there was the argument of you know running help them are get The MVP it gets the Ravens to the playoffs, but your argument was always it's not about the playoffs It's about winning Super Bowls But we really jumped out to me there was you mentioned the control and Lamar talked about having the keys to the Offense and being able to make checks at the line or scrimmage and that was something that was really curious to me Basically, he's saying in Greg Roman system He wasn't allowed to audible and make adjustments at the line Which is kind of crazy for me for a quarterback now going into his fifth year I'm interested to ask Gronk about that and see what he has to say because obviously he was with a quarterback Who was the best at making checks at the line of scrimmage and their whole offense was kind of predicated on that? How much of a difference it can make in this Ravens offense giving Lamar that type of freedom and getting those kinds of weapons Odell's a Bateman Andrews I mean we've been waiting for this version of Lamar to be unleashed for literally five years, so We also guys heard from from this other one MVP to another Patrick Mahomes yesterday guys there have been rumblings about him getting another Extension or redoing it or whatever that might look like he addressed his approach to those negotiations Very thoughtless. He always does. He's a master at the microphone and here's some of the highlights from that I've always said I worry about legacy and winning rings more than making money at this moment But I'm I know we keep communication. We see what's going on around the league But the same time I'll never do anything that's gonna hurt us from keeping the great players around me So it's kind of teetering around that line You just want to do whatever did not hurt other quarterbacks whenever they get their contracts come up But you want to kind of keep the bar pushing and so it's not about being the highest-paid guy It's not about making a ton of money. I've made enough money where I'll be set for the rest of my life But at the same time you got to find that line where you're making a good amount of money But you're still keeping a lot of great players around you so you can win these Super Bowls and you're able to compete in these games it's so Complicated and it's a polarizing conversation and people, you know, what it's what it's how do you value a few million? It's almost that how do you value a few million when you have 20 and when you don't you know when you have 40 when you have 60 Like what is it's a and and he makes it a bigger deal He's going macro what it means for the landscape of Quarterbacks getting paid and broke off in the league for years to come if he takes a little it's wild And so it sounds a little bit like they're keeping tabs on it Joe Borough getting a contract is gonna have an effect on what Patrick Mahomes's team and his side are gonna talk to the Chiefs about and my goodness This is super interesting and there's kind of three elements to this right I mean first off after this second MVP and this second ring I think we can all agree Patrick Mahomes is the best quarterback in the national football league right now But if you look at the way these contracts are going take a look here He slipped all the way to seventh the seventh highest paid quarterback in the league on a per year basis He took he took a he took a discount if you look at it Not scary at all about two months after he signed it which is great And he'll move tonight by the way when Borough and Herbert signing he'll move up to almost out of the top ten as far as quarterback Circumstances, it's crazy. Yeah, that's me fixed at some point. He knows that they know what I like that They're talking I like that they're talking about it. Yeah God, please none of that talk about it Yeah, he doesn't need to scrap for every cent He sort of said that alluded to that like he says he's pretty much set for life regardless But you do want to make sure you're getting a fair value for you and whoever's behind you and That's insane. It's supposed to be tough. What do you think? Yeah, no, I think you know It's just an interesting position that he's in now because he's kind of saying all the right thing But there's no like easy answer right because no matter what he does You know if he takes the full value the other quarterbacks are happy. Yeah But you know it could hurt his team if he takes the less it helps his team But then the other quarterbacks like dude you hurt my bargaining power now Because there's no way I'm gonna get paid more than you so you like put a cap on what we can make so and I know Chris Jones Well, let's talk about these players. I know Chris Jones wants to essentially take me through this and like what's going because the whole thing Is about how do I become flexible with these players exactly and when you look at over the next two years? basically all their key players Other than Travis Kelsey are due for new deals and Chris Jones is the one they really want to get done right now But he mentions even in that press conference of the Jerry's Snead is a big point emphasis and then you look at 2025 I mean Creed home free and Trace Smith have both been such a crucial part of this team being able to revamp its offense Without Tyree kill that offense line have been so strong and then obviously a bunch of pieces to that defense too So there are a lot of deals are gonna have to work out So, you know if he's able to give the team flexibility with this new contract It's gonna help them stay in contention, and if he doesn't that roster is gonna start to erode pretty quickly I didn't think he'd mention The third part of it, which is the how does it affect other quarterbacks down the pipeline like should he care? That's the sort of how much should I look into that? How much of that is even true? Yeah, he takes the team friendly deal. So looking into that Let's say my home's guys takes an extension for 40 million a year, right? That will mess up the market. Yeah So are the quarterbacks and sort of hurt their ability to negotiate new deals It seems like my home sort of embraced this responsibility and it I mean I know it's like kind of a first-world problem But it's kind of tough to you know have to take your family your team the entire quarterback position into account in this is a lot And it's the fact that he says it It's a weird thing for him to say if it's not something that's on his mind in his heart Yeah, for sure and yeah as he said the way these teams look in negotiations They're gonna be like oh my home's only making for you're not getting paid more than my homes It does happen yeah, but okay I have to bring something else up in all this because you've called me a sicko for some of my deep off-season dives But there was some real serious sicko stuff going on this Kansas City press conference from both the media and my home's The first question the first one when he gets up to the podium Was about Blaine Gabbard and even sicker listen to his answer Since he's been in the building he's been a true pro and he's he's came in you can see the talent You see why he was a I think he would believe top 10 draft picker a first round draft pick and the arm strength everything like that And he was just backing up with Tom So I'm asking him for any advice he can give me because if you're learning from that guy you're learning from the right guy So uh, there's another good quarterback good guy that can be in that quarterback room I mean Patrick you're coming off of a second MVP a second Super Bowl ring And you're spending your offseason and trying to pry Tom Brady's secret sauce out of my guy Blaine Gabbard So type of deranged behavior I can really get behind and in all seriousness It really does give you an insight into the mentality and the work ethic that's made mohomes successful that he's Exactly Brady would do that. Can you like I'm sure he would and we can ask ronk about it I mean, I don't know why Patrick mohomes doesn't just join the fan dual family Like we'd like and then you could just phone rob gronkowski and say tell me everything that Tom Brady ever did and said You know, we could just be a really easier streamline than you having to bother Blaine Gabbard about it. I'm just saying That's a great point. I'm just saying when I think of Blaine Gabbard I think of obviously Miss you would ask the why why the shorts come to my mind Oh, the short shorts. He likes to show off the legs Is that literally why I think of gym shorts. Yeah, yeah What that's that's what's in my mind. What's in gronk's mind?  We heard from Patrick mohomes. Aaron rogers got hurt being like a mule Okay. All right cast on from beauty and the beast is on next


Space Launch Delta 30 provided range support for the United States Space Force's tactically responsive Launch 2 mission on Sunday, June 13th from Vandenberg Space Force Base. The launch decision authority for this mission was Colonel Robert Long, Space Launch Delta 30 commander. Space Launch Delta 30 provided launch permission, range safety, area clearing, and weather support for the launch. The United States Operational Support Squadron typically provides a wide variety of support to any launch here at the western range. Our weather officers provide on-consol support by evaluating weather conditions for the rocket launch to make sure that the conditions are safe. The TAC-RL2 mission was executed by the Small Launch and Targets Division within the Space and Missile Systems Center's Launch Enterprise, and the payload was sent into orbit using Northrop Grumman's Pegasus XL rocket. This is a whole new program for us, and they're operating on a much shorter timeline. So, whereas the timeline would normally be years in development for a payload and months of planning to get a launch date set and lead up to that date and actually have a successful mission, the entire timeline for this program was much shorter. This specific mission for TAC-RL, being part of a demonstration of a brand new capability, it's just really exciting to be a part of that as we start a new capability for the Space Force. We also have intel operators that are on console, making sure that there's no threats to the launch process from any of our adversaries. And we also have our system maintenance flight is also on standby to make sure all the equipment, the weather sensors are up and operational to support the mission. For this specific Pegasus launch, we also add in our airfield support. So our airfield team will be here providing services and support to the L-1011 aircraft as well as the aircrew to make sure they get off the ground safely and then return safely after the mission is complete. Our weather flight is also then, the challenge for them is to provide weather support at both the launch box area to make sure the weather is safe for the Pegasus rocket to launch, but also providing that weather support at the airfield to make sure a safe departure and return for the aircraft and the route in between. So looking at the weather from the airfield out to the launch box and making sure the weather conditions are safe. Thank you. You did answer the question about the challenges. So was there anything that was actually particularly easy for the OSS office? So the aspects of the launch support that we do typically, a lot of that is very similar to what provide for this, besides the challenge of some of the extra stuff that we do in addition. Okay. The fact that this launch, the launch evolution was actually kind of measured in weeks and not months or years, was that a factor for OSS support? So the fact that this launch had a 21 day call up versus the typical months stand by for a launch that we can plan for, the challenge with that was scheduling, making sure we had the personnel available to support the launch when we didn't really know when it was going to happen. Otherwise, a lot of our processes are about the same and we're always prepared to support anything in western range that needs us to do. Let's gauge the morale and feelings of the OSS team members. Sure. This is something that is kind of unique. It's a new capability, an emerging capability for the air force. So how do people feel about this? Definitely the members of the OSS are excited to be a part of this launch. I know for a Pegasus launch, it's the first time in eight years they've had a Pegasus launch from here on the western range. So that's exciting to do something we don't get to do very often.


Appalachian Wireless makes it easy and affordable to tech the halls, extended through Christmas Eve, get an iPhone 13, 128 gig for only a penny with trade in, on a two-year contract on a mix and match or unlimited plan, plus no activation fee. We are you. We are Appalachian Wireless. Christmas on the Creek, a toy giveaway held in honor of Eula Hall and Robin Holbrook is returning this Friday, December 8th. The giveaway will feature toys for kids, photos with Santa, bike raffles and more. Forty years ago, the founder of the Eula Hall Health Center started Christmas on the Creek. She wanted to provide shoes for the people in the area that really didn't have a lot of funds to buy any. She also started doing dinners as well for the people in the community and then it kind of just evolved into buying Christmas gifts for the children. So this year we're going to keep her spirit alive as everyone knows she passed away a few years ago and her and her partner in crime, not really, but her partner Robin Holbrook, he was our physician's assistant for many years and he was very passionate about serving our community as well and giving back to the children. So in their absence we have worked extremely hard to keep their spirits alive and to keep Christmas on the Creek getting better every single year. The giveaway will be held at Eula Hall Health Center from 4 to 7 p.m. and kids of all ages are welcome. The kids will have a chance to see Santa Claus, the Grinch as well as we're going to be giving away cotton candy, popcorn, of course they'll get a gift from Santa Claus. Mrs. Claus will be here giving out treats behind the clinic so we also have Mrs. Claus's kitchen this year, it's just going to be so much fun and it's just something we love to do to give back to our community. For more information go to Eula Hall Health Center on Facebook. Reporting for Mountain Top News, I'm Brianna Robinson.