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out supporting them callers us when you see super trawlers fishing off the west coast of Ireland and our own fishing trawlers are tied up in port there is something wrong with this agreement another caller says where is the minister this morning nothing from him and the department he was on with Greg a few weeks ago saying he'd get this sorted incompetence of the highest order are elected representatives and officials are a disgrace so says Liam now I know the minister is actually on a trade mission in the U.S. at the moment that's my understanding of where minister Charlie mcconnellog is at the moment so he is not with us but who is with us is the Sinn Fein spokesperson on the marine and Dunigal Deputy Podrick McLaughlin Deputy McLaughlin good morning good morning Joel we have discussed this before with yourself on the show and on news of course but you're listening to father John Joe you're listening to Jared and of course you've you've heard what Dennis the skipper of the law and had to say this morning as well and it's a story sadly you've heard all all too often in the past couple of weeks yeah I've just discussed it but this has happened again so soon after the the meeting in Kelly Bailey's with few groups of people read their opinions very clear directly to the minister when they gave the evidence a testimony of what has been going on just for your listeners benefit I was in Kelly Beggs I was in a public meeting in recent weeks but it was there late last year specifically to look at the way in operation and one of the factory operators took me in and I could not believe what I was looking at basically and it was been widened it was been landed in that occasion so you have blue widened been pumped in out of boats on to refrigerated water it has to be kept at that temperature to keep it fresh for human consumption I've then taken a short distance to the factory where it was up over sort of conveyor belt system where it's weighed in real time now the SFPA see for she's protection authority in this particular factory have 10 separate CCTV cameras that are watching the weighing happening all the time they can land into the factory unannounced inspections they can go to the back to check the freezers but they have eyes on this weighing system you don't have to even have to leave their own office in Kelly Beggs they're monitoring the weighing of the fish all the time and how that is not enough to meet the responsibilities to the European Union I just cannot get my head around it I challenge the SFPA and I've done this in the ROCS committees but I challenge them here again today to tell me early industry in Ireland and a workforce in Ireland that would tolerate 24-hour CCTV monitoring you know of private businesses by a state authority and that still isn't good enough and then you end up with this tobacco where they're only given an allowance of 2% you know so whenever the fish are good with the water they allow 2% water it's insanity you know and I've said it at the public and I say again today this is sabotage by Irish people by Irish civil servants of our own industry that's already struggling to survive and then you have voices like John Drouffy and Gerard Kelly who are finding strong voices of fishing communities in Donegal you know the minister heard all of this and I understood there was a solution being worked upon and I'm disposed to hear the experience and you know the 50,000 loss at least income but of course more importantly the workers losing income I mean it's just despicable that this hasn't been confronted well I know two weeks or so ago minister Charlie McConaug was on the show here with Greg I spoke to minister McConaug myself about this issue a few weeks back as well and what we understood from him and what we've also understood from the SFPA is that this is it's all down to a European directive based on the control measures and new control measures were being introduced and as soon as the new control measures had been agreed then they could be implemented and we would see this issue addressed but what I'm hearing from people like John Joe and from Father John Joe from people like Gerard and from people like Dennis as well the skipper of the Lauren is that Europe is is not the problem here the problem appears not to be in Brussels the problem appears to be in Dublin Oh absolutely this is this is once caused by Europe I mean I mean if you go anywhere in Europe on pears and harbours anywhere you will not find this level of harassment and of insanity because you have to keep fish and by the way that's a European directive too you have to you have to keep fish at a particular freshness at a particular temperature by using refrigerated water by using ice these are the means keep fish fresh to get at the market over in Europe or across the world so these are the responsibilities that are upon the fish human and upon the fish producers so you're asking them to go against that to weigh it so why is this because across Europe most factories are actually located at the pier of the harbour in tilly bags normally a short distance away but they have to physically remove them from the pier of the harbour and weigh them and this is caused by Irish civil servants it's it's insanity it's willful sabotage now remember as the as Jared and Barbara John Joe and many others have been saying this is an industry that is struggling to survive you know if you go to Burton Ford Greencastle Kelly Beggs all the other small pears and harbours around Donegal they are you know a shadow of what they used to be getting to go and that's because of just civil servants and political leaders who have no passion for fishing communities who are not willing to stand up but in this case this is being stand up here this is our own sabotage of our own ministry you know I I can't convey how disgustful I am that this is continuing two weeks after the people of Kelly Beggs and surrounding communities made a stand the minister heard what they had to say and I I was convinced that within days we would have a solution it would finally be sorted out there's a weighing system on the pair that's ready to go that should have been deployed you know to solve this problem that's insanity you have raised this in the door in recent weeks I take it she'll be raising it again with the t-shirt and the minister this week oh absolutely I mean absolutely and you know the t-shirt pierced a hardy my colleague raised it very strongly with the t-shirt I raised it in the erotic and in the doll you know we've challenged the SFPA but at some point you know there has to be accountability you know people elect the likes of me Charlie McConn Logan Overs and but in this case Charlie McConn Logan's government and they have to see that those that they elect can hold people to account and this is the willful behavior of senior civil servants in the Department of Marine in the SFPA which I'm saying again I believe is sabotaging our own fishing industry not not this is not demanded by the European Commission by the European Union yes they ask that fish be weighed but for Christ's sake there's 10 cctv cameras in one factory I was in 10 cctv cameras but how much oversight do you need to prove that something's been done properly it's I understand I've never seen in all my times the public representative I've never seen any as as reckless and as stupid as what they are doing to our fishing industry W. Mcloughlin thank you very much indeed that's W. Mcloughlin there and anticipate we'll have more discussions about that end all air and end the coming days we're going to take a short break when we come back we'll be discussing the concept of building your own is it an art that we've lost and more importantly is it an art that we can get back Lidl's inflation busting offers are helping families all across Ireland as a family of five I have seen huge changes in the savings I see them every week there's a great variety of products very pleased with it inflation busting offers at Lidl more for you customers were paid a gratuity for their time if you're getting married the in-house design team at bizprint can get all your wedding stationery and signage customized to your requirements just visit weddinginvites.ie or call bizprint at port road editor Kenny on 917995 Milford tiles wood flooring on bath where milford retail park now open large range of wall and floor tiles on display and in stock over 70 different laminate floors to suit 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house and moved into the house and maintained the house and would have been in many cases self-sufficient that's a skill that was alive and well up to just a two or three generations ago we're told and Harrison Gardner is the author of a book building your own he's also presenting a tv series on the same theme and he's trying to get us to recover and retrieve that skill Harrison joins us on zoom Harrison good morning Hi good morning thanks so much for having me it is our pleasure Harrison I'm going to be honest and upfront I regard myself as a complete and utter klutz when it comes to doing things I couldn't hammer a nail straight I could barely put a picture up on a wall straight never mind even consider any form of DIY do you believe for people like myself there is some hope that we could learn to retrieve some of the skills that we've lost absolutely it's it's you're not alone in those feelings you know and I think the real the real goal here with the book the tv show and everything we're doing with our teaching school is to reignite the conversation of building your own home to kind of take back that conversation out of the architecture offices off the construction sites and back to the dining table because it really is something that affects all of us it's something that we all have a valid opinion in and we should all have a voice in and by learning a few things by learning a few techniques or a bit of information or the language that's used around these around these topics then we can really start joining those conversations and some people are going to go and build their own homes because financially that's their only option and for other people they're going to learn how to talk to their builder a little better and really know what they're asking for and what they're paying for from the point of view of planning and designing a home obviously there's you know you have to bring the architects in because you have to present plans to the planning office that will meet their requirements and they're going to be very very specific in what they want in terms of the application before you get permission to actually construct anything so obviously that's going to have to be done but your your belief is that once that's been done people can be far more proactive in what's happening in our own case about 10 years ago we put an extension in our house now I will be absolutely honest what we did it was we we spoke to a consultant in the architect's office stay effectively took on the role of being our project manager we spoke to them about what we wanted and needed he sat down showed us the designs we said that's lovely and then we moved out we rented another house close by and the builders and the architect's office guy that acted essentially as our clerk of works they got on with it and six months later we moved back into our renovated home and we went and had a look occasionally but I would have to be honest and say whereas we were heavily involved in the design we contributed absolutely zero to the actual building you believe that can change well I think to be honest from my side I think that's a it's a very lucky position to be in that you that you're able to do that I think for a lot of people the reality is they can barely afford their mortgage as it is or are struggling to get the mortgage so the idea of living somewhere else while paying someone else to build their home suddenly they have three huge expenses coming out at once and for a lot of people that's not possible and so building your own home has to be possible it has to be an option for everyone and it is in a lot of other countries and it's just awakening that culture here and bringing it back here because it always was a part of the culture in Ireland you know you even have a word for it here that coming from Australia I don't know the word for Mehl in Australia but there's a word here for this coming together and supporting your community and being supported by your community to make sure that everyone's housed and everyone's fed and everyone's looked after the word Mehl is an interesting one actually I mean obviously we're familiar with the word but a lot a lot would say sadly it's a word that harks back to an olden time but maybe it's an olden time and an olden tradition that you believe can be revived absolutely you know I think we have streamlined in the last two generations and we've all been encouraged to become specialists in one thing and subcontract every other part of our life out to other people and I don't think housing or food should be one of these things that you subcontract out to other people it's integral to what makes us human it's what we need to survive is housing and shelter and food and I think these are things that we should be talking about every day we should be thinking about constantly because houses aren't products they aren't something you buy off the shelf and you can return if something's broken they need to grow and change with us because we're constantly growing and changing ourselves so as we have kids as the family needs to move in as we decide we want to take up a new hobby and we need an art studio or an extension or whatever it is the house needs to keep evolving with us and without learning the skills and the ideas that it takes to design and create a space that can work for you that expense is never going to stop it's going to keep going out and for some people that's a really difficult reality to face so learning to build for themselves learning some of the basic tools and the language coming to something like common knowledge which is our build school that we run down in Clare can introduce you to 30 other people who all finding solutions who all believe that it's possible to take something like this on and everyone is at a different stage in that journey tell us something of your own background because it's clear from listening to you that you're passionate about this I'm not just listening to a professional who is imparting professional knowledge and perspectives I'm listening I believe to someone who is truly passionate and where has that passion come from? I guess I started out in conventional construction in Australia block and timber framing and I did that for several years and then I took those skills over to some developing countries and was working there for several years thinking that I was there to teach and what I realized was that there were styles of building out there that used a lot of the same principles but used very different materials and very different ideas depending on culture depending on climate and depending on finance and so over the years I've started mixing and matching the conventional construction techniques I have with the natural building techniques that I've learned and the recycled building techniques that I've learned over the years and what I've what's common across all of them are the basic principles that apply to all buildings and so I've divided the book into seven chapters that break up each of those principles of gravity foundations how heat moves in and out of a home what materials can be interchanged with other materials and I've tried to make it as digestible and easy to understand as possible because I've seen over the years after teaching over a thousand students now how to build that these ideas are tangible they are just there you just need to sit with them long enough and believe that you can learn them The TV show is accompanying the book and a lot of people will find that very interesting when can we actually see it? The show is coming out in September this year it's going to be a five-part series showing an RT1 and the principles of build your own are going to be explored in a number of areas and I mean you're talking about very practical stuff I mean things like plastering moving earth basic demolition installing insulation building eternal walls cladding things like that which I mean you know to me again I would be inclined to shirk very much from that but you're saying we don't have to shirk that we can actually take this on and perhaps surprise ourselves at how much we can do? Absolutely I would say only 20% of the jobs around a construction site are highly specialized the other 80% laborious tasks that can be learned that can be learned fairly quickly as well so if you're on a budget and if you have someone who's willing to show you how to do it like I did with the families on the TV show you're able to take on these projects and save yourself paying someone else to move things from point A to point B or someone else to install something in a wall that you're going to have to do 2,000 times throughout your house so if you learn it just once if you spend half an hour learning how to do it once you can be the one to repeat it that 2,000 times and save paying someone else to do that task You spoke about your experience going to developing countries where you expected that you would be the teacher imparting the knowledge what perhaps you didn't expect was that you would also be the student who would actually learn and learn techniques that you've managed to take on and presumably some of those techniques are now being built into what you're passing on to your students here Absolutely Yeah, that's been an integral shift in my life realizing that we're all teachers and we're all students simultaneously and there's no hierarchy and that's why we started our social enterprise called Common Knowledge because it's all just shared knowledge what we need to do is to increase this bank of general information and not shy away from having a little bit more understanding about more aspects of our lives because it's great to be specialized in one area it's important it's a great way to form a career but life is more than our job and we need shelter we need food we need community and there is a whole lot of knowledge that was very common just a few generations ago that we're losing today and so something we're doing with Common Knowledge is running a festival a one day festival called Rekindle down in Ennestheim in this May which is a intergenerational festival it's celebrating the knowledge that our elder members of our community have and showcasing them and connecting those members with younger members of the community to encourage knowledge transfer verbally and visually and tactically not just being stored in books in libraries Harrison it's been a pleasure speaking to you this morning and thanks indeed for sharing that with us and Harrison is author of Building Your Own Runs the Common Knowledge endeavor in Ennestheim just outside Ennestheim in County Clare and that Building Your Own TV series on RTE1 from September for now Harrison we look forward to that and thanks for much indeed thanks so much for having me bye it has been our pleasure that's Harrison speaking to us there from Ennestheim just outside Ennestheim in County Clare just some of your comments that have been coming in Collar says and this is in regards to the phishing why is an unelected committee in Brussels making these decisions for Ireland it's frustrating and makes me question if the UK did the right thing in leaving the EU unfortunately the way things have planned out we got into a very lengthy discussion on the Kilbeck situation and we haven't been in a position to speak to Brendan Duvenny so a question that had come in Collar is asking about the disallowed RMR goal on TV last night they said to the pundits said it should have stood two more said no it couldn't stand as it was thrown into the net whilst the ref right on this occasion I've no doubt that that will be addressed in detail on the DL debate which is on tonight so if you want to get the views of Brendan Duvenny it'll be on the DL debate night no doubt this is going to be discussed he'll have feedback and analysis from all the big games including Donegal versus Ross Common in the Nicky Rackard Cup Donegal versus Fermanna in the Minor Football Championship and of course the Donegal Ulster Senior Football Quarter Final guests will include Oshin McConnell and the DL news sports reporter Ryan Ferry that's this evening after the seven o'clock news also of course it's podcast on highlandradio.com going to take a short break back in a moment when we'll be speaking about news of a major development for the pair in Rathmonton there is a place with a proud history of helping others a place that refuses to look the other way today Ukraine needs help and that place is ready to welcome the Ukrainian people with open arms to support those who have to stay behind and there's a place to do it all IrelandForUkraine.ie a united response from Irish media organizations in support of charities that can make a difference both here and in Ukraine donate now at IrelandForUkraine.ie when your new smart meter arrives it's going to change everything about how you use electricity and Electric Ireland is ready to help you enjoy it all from choosing your own billing date to saying goodbye to estimated bills and taking more control over your usage you'll be able to make better energy 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dry with clear spells just some isolated light showers some mist and fog patches developing in a light easterly or variable breeze quite cold with lowest temperatures one to four degrees Celsius with a touch of grass frost possible tomorrow Tuesday it'll be largely dry and bright with long sunny spells again scattered showers possible in the afternoon top temperatures 12 to 14 in a light to moderate easterly breeze and that's the way the weather looks at the moment the 90 noon show is brought to you by letterkenny credit union with monster loans available up to 60 000 euro for all occasions visit letterkennycu.ie just a few of your comments if you're going to use different surnames for your children ensure you bring birth certs with you to the airport especially if your child's surname is different to yours many people have been caught out with this as it is a very important safety measure and a quarter says I always thought anyone who assumed a double barreled name in Ireland was a bit uppity and the nearest you got to having a title in this country we had a call about the census quarter says any census enumerator in the high vis jacket with census id can supply you with a large brown free post addressed envelope which allows you to confidentially mail your completed census form to census headquarters quarter says I got a text on Saturday to say my AIOB bank card had been compromised just to warn people this is a scam as I don't have an AIB account and I think we've all just become almost bored with receiving scam texts and emails I got a text last night on a Sunday evening from on post telling me that I owe money on a parcel and I'm not expecting any parcels and I have no doubt that that too is a scam and one of the things that they speak about is if you get a warning that you owe on post and this is the clever one they tell you you owe I mean I think about the amount in this text I got was about 179 and the thinking is that if they ask you for a small amount of money you're just going ah and you'll just pay it whereas if they ask you for a large amount of money you'll think about it and the irony is if it's a large amount of money they're asking for that one it's probably genuine however it's just always be very very wary and if you believe that something is a scam never click a link never respond back and if the text or message or whatever purports to be from on post or from a bank or wherever don't click a link ring them directly and they'll put you right Colours has great news for Donegal peers and harbours today 15 million announced fair play to mcconnellogue and Donegal county council so says the caller now indeed over 14 million is to be spent on rejuvenating marine infrastructure in Donegal it's under the brexit adjustment reserve now part of this is ongoing funding for the works which are ongoing at the breakwater in green castle also works being done in Burtonport and Mahary which as we know is underway and a significant project for the peer in Rathmullen and I'm joined on the line by Senator Nile Blaney Senator Blaney good morning good morning Donald the work on the peer in Rathmullen and we're often told that the peer in Rathmullen is to a large extent an underutilized and underused resource and good to see that some money is now being put into it and it's good to see I suppose Rathmullen is one of those after that is being under wait restrictions for quite a many years but moreover Donald I wasn't just ringing by Rathmullen I was ringing in relation to all the announcement this morning because Minister McCann loads out of the county he'd be on to himself and they had to be around he's out of the country actually in government business but the amount of money that has been received for peers in Harvard across the county has been quite significant announcement for only one year there never has been one this large in a given year and moreover the overall announcement with the practically half the money that had been announced and I suppose people wonder you know why did that happen the reason that happened is there's been a little not a lot of planning going into this behind the scenes first of all the Minister McCann look and giving these monies to the the Brexit adjusted the reserve fund moreover then the work that he has done with his colleagues in the council and government colleagues also in the council what's the county manager and Cal Sweeney the engineer over the last year to examine our peers and harbours in the state of them during the last year and to identify what funds were needed to put them right and he has battled hard to get these much needed monies but they're very very hard in terms of the individual projects I mean they are to build up the infrastructure they are to make things easy now you'll be aware obviously there is an ongoing discussion about the situation in Kili Beggs and inevitably we're getting people are making the comment that they're saying look it's all very well to build up infrastructure but we're creating a situation where we're building infrastructure and we're building peers but the way we're treating our fishers and the way we're actually dealing with the fleet and the way we're dealing with the industry it seems people say leave a lot to be desired well I think that's unfair first of all don't because the Kili Beggs issue is a Kili Beggs loan issue from the point of view that they spent the last six months of last year having everything waited to peer with the Monsman Khan Loog's input he's got a situation that 10% will be waited to peer now there are issues there but it's going to take down heads I do know what Monsman Khan Loog is infrastructurely for the country he's very focused but he's also focused on settling issues like this I believe the solutions that can and will be implemented but it's going to take down heads and we met them down there recently but there's a matter of working together before he can get a final solution to this we need to overcome the current hurdle solutions are there and it's going to take everybody around the table to hammer that out and sort it out I believe it's resolvable it just needs the right focus and Minister Monsman Khan Loog is very focused and he's very solution oriented as well and I hope that comes in conclusion sooner or later because it's an efficient meant list to take it to a conclusion sooner or later certainly the scenario that was described to us by Dennis the skipper of the law and was a scenario that seems utterly unsustainable so we'll be watching that one obviously with interest in terms then of the infrastructure talk to us a little about what is planned for Rathmore and because obviously you'll be taking a keen interest in that being from the fanat area yourself I mean you know it does seem that obviously ongoing work on the breakwater at Green Castle there's ongoing work in Burtonport and we've seen an awful lot of being done by Donegal County Council and the local community there Rathmore and a lot of work has been done along the shore and for that to be expanded out onto the pier suggests you know that there's maybe good good things in the future yeah well I suppose at the end of the day if you have any infrastructure you want it to be at its ultimate and Rathmore hasn't been at its ultimate for quite many many years there's been a three and a half tonne restriction on it and for probably well over 10 years at this stage and I think there's there's lots of possibilities for Rathmore and it's actually one of the deepest ports in the country there are 30 deepest ports in the country from the point of safety point of view of the Government of North Atlantic it's a vital piece of infrastructure and more over the later it's starting to take off there as well there's there's many opportunities to be explored from Rathmore and it's vital now that we get these money spent in a speedily fashion up in Mullen and functioning like it should be up here and we know obviously the Rathmore and to Bunkrana ferry service has been a huge success over the years with the support of Donegal County Council and we we we hope to see that when confirmed and back on the water again comments that's come in from the councillor Ian McGarvey Rathmore and should be considered a port for liners its depth of 40 feet would suggest that he could take some of the smaller cruise liners in there and now obviously it would take quite a lot of work to develop facilities at the pier and on the ground for that maybe to be feasible but I mean certainly as you've already acknowledged I mean it does have the depth so you know if you had the facilities you could be looking at some of the smaller cruise ships coming right into Rathmore absolutely you don't I would be open to looking at any ideas Rathmore and Greencastle areas like that absolutely open to cruise liners and it's about as well as creating the mindset and the ideas are you can put floating pontoons like the facilities of the cruiser but at the end if you were going to bring many cruises on you would look for I just I think a little to there much more concrete infrastructure facilities on the ground to accommodate these large cruisers because the very large ones would take about 115 meters of a pier to land at but there are smaller ones as well but you know many ideas they get you know there's not a lot of potential of Rathmore and it is on tap I remember a year to go behind the lynching having the councils down and doing a talk in relation to our marine in there that's a fantastic location fantastic facilities around here and very much open to explore and ideas with with any community or councils around the area in relation to and obviously Greencastle that break what are there we've been told for many many years that Greencastle's potential for further growth has been hampered because of the lack of a proper breakwater and the fact that that will finally be addressed after many years discussions can only be positive Oh absolutely there's massive potential of Greencastle you obviously have your fish in there and then the ferry as well but from the point of view of even expanding as a port or the liners again I believe there's massive opportunities for the liners on the doorstep of Derry City you have the the anthropocross line the Nicole coastline there's so many attractions here and I believe there's many many possibilities for for Greencastle to develop so that's this is a welcome start the force monitor came the fear was that from so many for spent years and years ago on the breakwater that would be lost as thankfully it's been protected with any call any kind so and moreover I want to thank any call any kind so far the efforts they have them because really if they hadn't the house in order we wouldn't be able to and I see monies today so thanks for the help they were in that they worked really hard over the last year and now in a position to work the way to run and create these projects on the ground to ensure they're happening and I have no doubt in many of these cases and particularly infrastructure they were the the allocations of infrastructure that's going to lead those pairs and others in good shape for for quite a a number of decades well we know that Daniel got to speak to Minister Charlie McConnell over the weekend on this issue so we do we do have we have had a word with Minister McConnell and we'll hear people can hear what the Minister had to say if they want to go on to our website HighlandVideo.com and they'll hear the Minister's views there and thank you indeed as well Senator Benney for speaking to us this morning Senator Daniel Benney there and that's pretty much the 9 till noon show for today Greg back on the program in the morning for myself Donald Kavana it's been a pleasure as always thanks indeed to Caroline who produced the show for all of her help thanks to Donna Marie for all of her help as well coming up next we have John Breslin he's going around the northwest and very interesting and packed program from John as always but from myself Donald thank you very much indeed and have a very good day


not just words. We want action. There has to be sanctions. There has to be accountability. The impunity of Israel must end.  The apartheid, no apartheid state, any more than South African apartheid, had any place in the company of civilized nations. They have no place. They have no right to defend the apartheid. They have no right to defend ethnic cleansing. They have no right to defend occupation. The people of Palestine have the right to resist all of those things.


Thank you, Susanna, for the kind introduction and thanks to Paul for inviting me to speak. I just need to get my slides up. Hopefully I can shut that. All right, so I am going to start the timer. I'm going to try to schedule things so we can still finish on time but have a few minutes for questions. So I'm going to condense a little bit. I'm going to focus really on kind of trying to give you an introduction to FET, but also talk more about the role of open within our project and how that's worked. So just to get a sense from you, how many of you had heard of or seen FET before coming to the conference? How many have actually played with the FET simulation? How many of you have disseminated or used FET within your work in open education? All right, well I am here to try to change that. Okay, so this brief outline, what is FET? And then focusing in on what is the role of open licensing and its impact within our project. And I'm going to leave with just a couple of challenges and opportunities that our project is working on. So FET was founded way back when open started in 2002 by Carl Weiman. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001 and he used simulations as a way to explain his complicated science to general audiences. And he just found this tool incredibly powerful for making these complex ideas accessible to broad audiences. And he saw that through the sort of complexity of the questions that they were asking back. It was indicative of the fact that they were understanding the fundamental ideas that were a part of his work. So he founded FET with the goals of making STEM learning more engaging, so making it more interactive, letting students really engage and explore and discover the key ideas through interaction to making science more relevant to these students, to a broader range of students, to showing them how science really was explaining the world around them and how they could use science in their everyday lives. Making it more accessible, both just the broad access, getting tools to where tools are needed, but more generally to make it more accessible by making it more intuitive and understandable through the tool that you're using to explain that science. Making it more effective, lots of science is taught without even students engaging in science practices, so integrating that into the process of learning science and also to develop a deeper conceptual understanding. A lot of research in physics education has shown that students at all levels can take a physics class or a science class and leave without developing a conceptual understanding of the underlying ideas and to make it more personalized where students have a lot more agency over how they're learning and understanding science. So focusing in, just to really emphasize this point, is a goal to make science learning more active. So science is an active process. Our curiosity is engaged in understanding the world around us. We engage in experimentation, collecting data, modeling that data, gathering evidence, giving our reasoning. It's really active and so often science learning isn't taught in that way and to integrate that into the whole system and to do that through the use of interactive simulations. So we are situated at the University of Colorado Boulder in the physics department here in this big tower with these nice mountains behind us, just sort of like we have mountains here. We have two sides of our project. We really have a product development side where we're trying to generate high quality OER and put it out to the world. We also engage in research, so we sit within a physics education research group in the physics department and we engage in research around simulation design, how do students engage in learning from a simulation and also how you can integrate simulations into the classroom and how that changes the learning dynamic between students, between students and teachers and between everything and the content that's being learned. Today we have over 150, I think it's 157 simulations, 82 and HTML5 for those. It's really important but not everybody understands why. 2000 simulation based lessons. We cover physics, that was our home that was where we started. We expanded chemistry, math, or science, biology. They're used in 12 and college. It's a middle school, high school and introductory college are leading categories of use. They are an OER, they're licensed under the CCB license, they're translated into over 90 languages and they can run online or offline. So one of our access solutions is to provide an installer for our entire website. So you can download a single simulation and port that around on a thumb drive or you can download a full installer of the entire website and bring that to your unconnected school and install it on computers and then you have all the simulations that were available at that time that you downloaded the installer. So this is our growth over the years. Right now we're at about 120 million runs per year. We've delivered 650 simulations total but plus offline use. So this offline use is impossible for me to tell you how much that could be. I think it could double this number but I can't tell you exactly because we have no data on that. So this is what our content expansions looked like over the years. We started in kind of introductory physics and then we expanded to quantum physics in 2005, chemistry in 2008. Middle school science in 2010 where we did a lot of learning about how simulations can be designed for younger students and we've now integrated that across our simulations. We expanded to math in 2012 and then to sort of focused in on algebraic thinking in 2015. And I am trying to raise money to focus on K1 math because I think that is so influential. I want to do that. Technology advancement, we first built the simulations in English and then in 2004, pretty early on, we made them translatable into Spanish in a very rudimentary way. And then we made the simulations translatable so anybody could translate them into any language. Then we made the website translatable, a bigger task but still doable. We completed our first simulation in HTML5 in 2013. And the reason that's notable is because we started when Java and Flash were the technology of simulations and now they are incredibly hard to run. Flash is sunsetting at the end of 2020 and Java is just a technically challenging thing to run these days. So we're working on moving everything to HTML5 but it is a very resource intensive process. But we're leveraging every opportunity that comes along with having to redo all that work. And part of that was the ability to sort of actually face head on the challenge of how you make things that are so visual accessible to students who are non-visual, how to make them screen reader accessible, how to do the descriptive, interactive descriptive text that allows non-visual students to fully engage in a simulation. And we released our first accessible sim in 2017. We are still working on that technology challenge but it is fun and exciting. So this is what our global use looks like. It's 33% international, essentially used in every country or territory. I kind of plotted this minus the US because the US just dominates otherwise. These are top 15 minus the US countries that are using the simulations online. I can only get Google Analytics. So I am going to show you some simulations now. Since many of you haven't seen them. So they're built as these open exploratory play spaces that they don't come up with directions. You just start engaging with them. Buckets tend to be a very attractive thing for students to start with. So they don't really have trouble starting with that. You can see I'm pulling in protons, neutrons, electrons. Every time I pull in a proton, you see the element name change. Every time I pull in a neutron, you'll see the mass number change. And every time I pull in an electron, you'll see the charge change. And students can easily engage with this in an inquiry-based way to discover the basic rules about atoms. Things that you would normally have to have told them just how atoms work before. Now we can provide them with this interactive and much more engaging environment to learn about these fundamentals. This screen layers up to this idea of how chemists capture this information in the chemical symbol here. And there's a game for students to test their understanding. Sometimes students will jump straight to the game and they'll realize, I don't understand this. But then they always have access to the Explorer screen to go back and see what's going on there. So that is one of our simulations. I'm going to show you a range because we have some different styles. This next one is called circuit construction kit. And it really is a kit. It's more like building blocks and you can build whatever you want to a certain degree. So here you pull out wires, light bulbs and batteries. As soon as you connect them, you see the electrons flow. So you get immediate feedback that that's working. You can do things like change the battery voltage. That's what more like an undergrad might do. An elementary student might just grab another battery and see what happens there. So there's multiple ways to interact with these things. And if I flip this battery, for instance, well, that was at 9 volts. If you keep them at the default, then what you see is essentially that you've canceled out all of your voltage so you don't have anything left. You can pull out volt meters. So you can really use this tool to engage in a whole range of learning from sort of the basics about electric circuits to getting at the college level about parallel and series circuits, taking a set of data. You can even hear change the resistance of the light bulb. So you can do things that are just not possible in the real world to develop your understanding. Within math, we have arranged one of my kind of favorite ones that we did earlier on is this one about fractions. And again, it's just gives students a way to engage in discovering, you know, what does that top number do? What does the bottom number do? They can play with the numbers. They can play with the pieces. They can rearrange the pieces. They can look at different representations, including cake. They can play with the number line. So it integrates all the way to the number line. And again, if you change the denominator, you'll see that show up on your number line. There's a game where students can practice building fractions. If they, if they get it wrong, just pops back out. They can try again. And they can build it however they want. So there I put the two-fourths. I put a half and two-fourths because it is a half. And here I did the opposite. So it's really flexible. There's an open lab for students, for teachers to now discuss. You know, okay, Sammy, come up and build a one-half. Now can somebody else come up and build a one-half in a different way? And so then they, they, teacher can facilitate a lot of discussion around how, multiple ways to build a one-half and how that works. Okay, and this one is gravity and orbit seems to change forces and watch your planet crash into the sun and things like that. So, keep an eye on time. So within our project, we really do focus on a research-based design cycle around building these simulations. We start with the learning goals and with the research base. So the research base around how people learn and everything that goes along with that. The research base around simulation design, but also specifically the research base around student difficulties within a particular content space. With circuits, one of the student difficulties is, do I still have it up? One of the student difficulties is that current is used up. And in, and in this simulation, what you can see is that, you know, current is not used up here. There is the same, the electrons are going the same speed here as here. And if I pull out my current meter, I can actually measure that with my current meter. So we specifically look at the student difficulties around particular content spaces and build that in to how the simulation is designed. And then we also engage in interviews for every simulation. So we bring students in. We watch them use the simulation. We look at the flow. We look at their interpretation of their representations. We make sure that they are leaning into the simulation, asking their own questions, engaged and, and making progress towards the learning goals that we've identified for the simulations. Each one, we have a team of about four to five experts. So those are experts in teaching the content, experts in the content itself, experts in simulation design, and experts, software developers. Each one takes about 200 hours of design and 600 hours of development plus student interviews and quality assurance testing. So these are not, these are things you can, hard to do this level of simulation on the weekends. So one key idea is this idea of implicit scaffolding. So you saw there's no like directives in there about touch this, touch that. So we call that implicit scaffolding. We scaffold through the design by how we place the controls, what dynamic feedback we provide as students interact. We build in the real world connections. We show the models that scientists use. So there's lots of simulations that will show vector models and things like that, that scientists use to actually develop their own understanding. We show the invisible. So we show leptons, atoms, photons. And we do allow these actions that aren't possible because lots of times they will help students develop their understanding. So being able to dynamically change the resistance of the lipo, you can swap a resistance out in the lab, but that dynamic ability to change and see what happens immediately helps build that cause and effect relationship that we're trying to help students develop. So the result is a simulation tool that can support multiple learning goals all at once. So it can support students' content development, their concepts, their models, their understanding of representations and relationships. But it also can support their engagement in science processes and practices. So exploring and questioning and predicting what's going to happen when something changes. When you embed it into a learning environment, it can also support students' ability to engage in argumentation and collaboration, support their development of lab techniques, and one of our main goals is to support their enjoyment of learning science and to not leave class with saying things like, I'm not a science person. That everybody can be a science person and to develop their ability and their identity as a scientist. So we encourage a lot of student agency in the implementation of the simulations. So basically we try to develop these high-quality tools that also have high flexibility. So you can use them in lecture. You can use them in lecture tutorial or small-class discussion. Here, this is a university classroom. It happens a lot at the K-12 level too. You can use them in lab. You can use them as an outside of kind of class time thing, as a pre-lab, a pre-class assignment, a homework. You can basically use them with any kind of pedagogy and any kind of, you know, learning environment, whether you're online or offline. You don't need to be able to run them. That is the one requirement. But you could be a completely traditional instructor and we see lots of them using the simulations as a demo because the simulations are just like they think in their mind, so they really are attracted to them. And then we see a lot of people using the simulations to engage in much more reformed classroom practices. So now I want to engage you in experiencing it a little bit. If I can type. So I'm going to pull up a simulation called Curve Fitting. And I'm going to keep an eye on the time. I think we have time to do this. So here you can pull out data points. And these data points are kind of special. You can change their error bars. Fancy. And you can plot a best fit curve. So I'm going to pose this question to you. How many have engaged in sort of concept tests or peer discussion ever? Oh, nobody. Not very many people. Okay, this is awesome. So in lecture, in college, we use this a lot to make lecture more interactive. And it's good for you guys to wake up, so I'm going to do it. So the way this works is I pose a question and then you're going to turn to your peer, your neighbor.  And then I'm going to ask you to vote. And here I've just given the responses one or two or three. So I'm going to ask you to vote like this. Like a one, two, or three. So nobody else has to see how you vote, really. Just me. If I was in a classroom, I'd have clickers or a colored car. I'm going to go to the graph I just made. So if we increase the error bar on this one data point, what's going to happen to the slope of the best fit line? So this is the best fit line. Is it going to become more negative? So is it going to tilt clockwise? Like this? Or is it going to become less negative? Is it going to tip up like this? Or is it not going to change? OK. So now it's your turn to turn to your neighbor and think about this. So go ahead. Awesome. That's what I love. If I was actually teaching a class in college, I would walk around and listen in on the conversation. So I would get some pre-knowledge about what the students were thinking before I asked for votes. But some insights into what votes meant. But I don't have that much time. So let's go ahead and vote. OK. On the count of three, you're going to hold up a one or two or three just in front of your body. So OK. One, two, three. OK. Not everybody's voting. Everybody should be holding a one or two or a three. Like what your answer is? You're voting your answer. Like do you think it's answer one, answer two, or answer three? OK. So it's a totally split vote. I'm saying one, so I'm saying two. And I'm saying three. And that's not unusual at all. Because it's not that intuitive. But you've had to discuss it. You've had to think about it. You've had to reason about what is going on here. So now we're going to do the experiment. And we're actually going to change this. And you're all going to see what happens. Ready? Why did that happen? So that's why it happened is because these error bars tell me something about how uncertain this point is.  So that's not very good. You should just not count it very much. So it's kind of like throwing that point away if you make the data. The error bars really big. And if you make them really small, it's going to count much more and tip it up. But there's other intuitions that you might have had. So if it's really big, the line should definitely go through it. So it's going to shift up. Or the line shouldn't care about it because the central data points aren't changing at all. So there's a lot of ways that students can reason there. And so you could have an interactive discussion. But that was fun. OK. So you did engage in, sorry, my time got shrunk. So here I am. So you did engage in science practices. To think about reflecting on what those were while you were doing that. This is what it can look like in a smaller classroom. So this is a teacher introducing fractions. What? So I thought I had till 10.30. I have a timer. I'm good. I'm sad. I'm on this. They change a conversation with the bottom number. So that is just to show you that the same thing happens with little kids too.  What does the bottom number do in that fraction I showed you? And they will start talking about it. So it can really impact learning. So we did a study in learning fractions for fourth graders. This was knowledge that they should have learned in third grade. In the pre-test they came in, they knew the procedural knowledge of fractions pretty well. But they were not doing so good on the conceptual ideas within fractions. And after sort of a three-day working session, like three consecutive classes working with the simulation and retesting, they really increased that conceptual knowledge and reinforced their procedural knowledge. The same thing happens in college class.  And then we used our wave on a string SIM to demo it instead. And in this case, the SIM gave a dramatic improvement in students' ability to visualize what a standing wave was and how things were moving. So moving to the role of open. So we build these simulations as I explained. They're really highly designed. So we actually emphasize four of the five Rs within the simulation itself. Retain, reuse, revise, and parentheses, remix, and redistribute. So math and science are this universal language. So generally, you see the same student difficulties all around the world, no matter who the students are. And the tools are so highly designed that we do not make it that easy to revise. The source code is open and some people do grab the source code, but then it's impossible to maintain because Apple and everybody changes things. So we don't encourage changing the source code that much. But we do make it really easy to access and to adapt. So we make it embeddable and downloadable. We don't require internet. It's easy to reuse. We can add in the language. We also let you kind of use a query parameter to select just one screen so you can better structure the lessons. What we do encourage is adapting SIM-based learning environments. So the SIM is not the only thing. It's just this open tool. You build some activity or task around it. You have teacher facilitation. It's all occurring in a context. And that makes it incredibly reusable and powerful to localize into various contexts.  This can be, you know, what you do exactly will vary with the grade level, the prior knowledge of the students, their cultural experiences, the teacher's learning goals, their pedagogical approach, their content knowledge. And their pedagogical content knowledge. You're surrounding that by the learning context. Are you in school? Are you in a museum? Are you homeschooling? Are you doing an after-school program? You know, what is the setting that you're choosing to use the simulation in? Is it a large lecture?  Online courses, textbooks, video tutorials, they can use in any of these contexts. It also will depend on the tech resources you have. So do you just have one projector? Do you have one-to-one devices? Are you in a fully online environment? Do you have other experimental equipment you're trying to work with or math manipulables? You know, what do you have available to you? It also depends on what country and community and culture you're living in. So what language, what national standards, you know, what's your environment or your community and how does that influence what you do? So we build an open ecosystem around the simulations to translate a simulation We have a lesson exchange database where we encourage teachers to share their lessons and search for lessons as usable starting points and all of those are shared as CCBYs. So on any simulation webpage you'll find the submitted activities and you can also submit your own activities. We also partner with other open education projects as part of our remix and redistribution partnership. So OER Commons, OpenStacks uses the simulations in their work. Learning Equality and Calibri brings it to offline communities. Hippocampus integrates it. Golab is a project in the Netherlands that uses it. I can never pronounce that. It uses it in their textbooks. So this is what it looks like around the world. This Burundi, Indonesia, Cambodia, Mexico, Nigeria, Vietnam. So you see just like a huge range of what was available there. But for the most part students were using the simulation, so that's really exciting when you see this. This is something that really excites me. So we are seeing increasing local research on FET simulations. So I just do like every now and then I do a Google scholar search of FET simulation education to sort of get the right context. I don't look at every one of these links because there's too many and some of them are in other languages and I can't understand it. But you can see that back here this was pretty much us doing research. But now there's more than like 700 links on Google Scholar that have FET simulations in the link. And these are real papers and I'm just like, oh my God, there's so many people doing stuff. So in 2019 in South Africa there were some researchers looking at the student impacts on attitudes towards learning chemistry and the third year Bachelor of Education students. So they found basically significantly higher mean post-attitude test scores and that the students liked experience autonomy and enjoyment with the simulations. In Zambia they looked at the impact on E&M learning for 11th grade students and saw positive impact in performance and attitudes. In Thailand they looked at, now pedagogically they looked at integrating simulations with formative assessment. It was in the context of buoyancy. And they found a positive impact of the integration of formative assessment pedagogy with the simulations on the learning outcomes. In Indonesia they looked at FET simulations and its ability to enhance critical thinking skills in the work energy context, small study. Lots of these are kind of small studies. I looked for one in Italy because that's where we are. So in Italy there was this one conference proceedings I think, conference proceedings looking at the ordering of real, using real stuff versus virtual stuff or virtual versus real and how that worked. Which ordering was better for, this is a grade school study for electrostatic attraction. When I looked at the graph and their conclusion was that the ordering didn't matter in the final understanding but it did impact sort of when students got that understanding. The simulation they got it faster. There was one in Lebanon about virtual versus physical experimentation around circuits. Anyway, there's a lot of stuff out there. It's crazy. And it's really exciting to see. So our challenge is an opportunity. We do have a really large effort right now around accessibility and inclusive design and that's led by my colleague Emily Moore. And it's been work going on for a few years now. You can find out a lot more about it at this link under website accessibility. But this simulation is fully accessible, screen reader compatible on our website right now. There's a lot of technical challenges around that. We had to build a technical solution and as well as pedagogical solutions to try to create the same sort of inquiry based experience that you can have with a regular SIM and do that through screen readers. And it actually uses the same tool. It's not a different tool. It's the same tool. It's just the tool that can do both things. Another challenge is sustainability. So we have been working on building a business model. Sustainable mission driven business model is how I call it. So we have various threads that we're trying to do that. But that is certainly a challenge. I don't have the right answer. But we do have a lot of business partners now. They don't pay all that much. But it is mission driven. So every time a simulation is in one of their products, it's benefiting the students that are accessing their products. Like if their school is still using a Pearson product, well at least now they can use a simulation that's good with that Pearson product. So right now we're at about 20% of the budget through our business model. So we still have to really thank our funders because they keep us in business. And we're really grateful to the community that helped support us. This is the team. You know, I'm up here representing us. But they're really a talented group of folks that are very passionate about this work. And thankful for the award that we got this year. So you can find FET online. You can contribute lessons. You can disseminate it if you're interested in partnering in some way. That's my email and you can connect to us on Twitter or Facebook. So thank you. Thank you very much, Katie. I can witness that when we have a workshop about open educational resources, our teachers are usually not aware about repository except FET. FET is always very well known by our teachers. So there is a question somewhere? Please. Before that, okay. Whoops. Well, first of all, I'm really glad to see FET being here because I've been using FET since I think 2014 when I was giving a chemistry and physics course to first year bachelor students. And basically the physics students need to come up to speed on their chemistry. And the chemistry students needed to get up to speed on their physics. And it was an incredible pain to teach all of them at once in the same classroom. And these simulations really, really helped with that to give them some feeling of independence in their own learning process. So first of all, thank you then for that. The second thing, what I was wondering, you were saying that the transition from Java to HTML5 is quite labor intensive, right? So I was wondering, now that FET is really becoming big and a lot of people are using it, and it's open source, is this something you can ask of the community? Please contribute by helping us transition into a more modern digital environment. Would that be a consideration for you? So we have been kind of having volunteers come in to help us with some of that transition. But it takes a while. So FET is built on its own code base. It's HTML5, but it's not just sort of vanilla HTML. It's its own code base and it has its own structure. And so, you know, I'd be interested in exploring it, but right now we do kind of experience that it takes about a year for a developer to really get up to speed. And that's a developer working sort of full time on the project. So I don't know how we'd be able to sort of restructure that so that it could be sort of the more of the open source community where people are taking on little problems at once. Yeah, I'm happy to, if anybody has questions you can come up and I'm happy to stick around. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you again. When I first started in OER, FET is one of the first things that I actually came across. I had two very quick questions. One, is there a sort of feedback mechanism beyond like sending an email? Oh, this is kind of funky or, oh hey, could you maybe do this a little bit differently? And then also, you mentioned that you were having the HTML5 thing. Have you noticed that the converted HTML5 iterations are concentrated in any particular category or subject or they kind of spread out across the entire sort of catalog? So email is really the best. We do read our email and like if there's user suggestion, we'll make a ticket around that within the repository of the simulation. So that's really the, we don't get so many emails that we don't read them. We read them. I don't read them, but we read them. It's really a funding issue. So we are trying to convert our most popular simulations first. So we're kind of going back popularity more than by content space. You'll see a lot of the math are in HTML5 because they were actually funded after we converted. So it's also the oldest ones that are suffering the most because they're all in Java and Flash and anything new is in HTML5. So if people have ideas of funders that might want to help, it's really kind of the most challenging piece of raising money is to get people to redo software.


Our next speaker is Julia Galef. You saw her earlier yesterday on a panel discussion. Her topic is how to change your mind. Come on in, come on in, come on in. Here's the limerick. When shown proof that counters belief, most folks get filled up with great grief. Now Julia's here to say loud and clear what you can feel is joy and relief. Please welcome Julia Galef. It's great to be here. This is my first solo talk at Tams. I'm really excited. Thanks. You've heard a fair amount already this weekend about cognitive biases, which are sort of the focus of my organization, the Center for Applied Rationality. And just in case you want a refresher definition of what the field of cognitive biases is all about, this is my favorite definition. Cognitive biases, the study of what other people think. And I'm just curious. How many of you, when you read that definition, thought to yourself, yes, exactly. That's exactly how other people think about biases. I've gotten that response before, just saying. And to be fair, I think it's not actually that unreasonable because it's so easy to see how other people are wrong and it's so hard to see how we're wrong. Not just emotionally, but cognitively. It's hard. Our brains are wired to see the evidence for our beliefs and not to see the evidence against our beliefs. It's hard. So what do we do about it? Well, I think that we can train ourselves to notice clues in the world. Little trails of bread crumbs that we can follow to find the things that we might need to change our minds about. Those clues I call anomalies. Take a look at this picture. Raccoons on a hillside. So how many of you noticed that that's not actually the sky above the raccoons? The body of water. Some people? Yeah. So if your mind works at all like mine, this is the process you go through. You see the picture? You see raccoons on a hillside sky. Boom. And then a moment later, this weird little detail catches your eye. There's this rock that seems to be floating in the air above the hillside. So your eye sort of lands on that and it confuses you. You go, huh.  And then one or two beats later, depending on whether you're quicker than me. You notice, oh, that's not actually the sky. That's the reflection of the sky in a body of water. And the rock is poking up out of the water. Oh, and then perhaps you start to notice other more subtle anomalies that you hadn't noticed before you were, you know, switched to the water model instead of the sky model. Like, I don't know if you can see from where you're sitting, but there are little ripples in the sky. And once you're viewing that as a body of water, the ripples are obvious, but they certainly don't jump out at you when you think that that's the sky. And this process is sort of in miniature what science as a discipline does to advance. This is how scientists collectively notice anomalies and change their minds about how the world works, about how human psychology works or how the solar system operates or just how the fundamental laws of physics work. But I think that this is also a great model for how we as individuals can learn to change our minds. So this is the classic example of scientists noticing anomalies and changing their minds from the 16th century. This is the picture from my title slide. It's actually the path of Mars across the sky. And that little kink in Mars' path across the sky was to the 15th and 16th century astronomers what the floating rock was in the raccoon picture to us. It doesn't make sense in their model of the world. Their model was the geocentric model in which the sun and the various planets all revolved around the earth in circular orbits. And so it does not make sense why Mars would be traveling that way. And then Copernicus put forward the heliocentric model in which the earth and the other planets were revolving around the sun. And suddenly the little kink in Mars' path snapped into meaning. That's exactly what Mars would look like to us if we were orbiting the sun in a tighter path than Mars. And interestingly, in the following decades after Copernicus put forward his model and it started getting more widespread and accepted, astronomers started noticing other subtler anomalies that they hadn't seen before. So under the geocentric model, the heavens were immutable, same stars past, present, future. And so now they started noticing comets, new stars appearing, none of which would have been possible under the geocentric model. And interestingly by contrast, Chinese astronomers had never been operating under this immutable heavens model. And they had been recording new stars and comets for centuries before Western astronomers got around to it. So this is basically the classic example of science noticing an anomaly and changing its mind in response eventually. And this is sort of the same process that I think that we can go through as well. You have a built-in anomaly detector in, for lack of a better word, your gut. You are constantly predicting what's going to happen next on a subconscious level. So if you see a glass fall off a table, you are predicting that it's going to fall and probably shatter. If you watch a Disney movie, you are predicting it's going to have a happy ending. And if you see George Robb walk out on stage, you're predicting he's going to say something funny. And when you read words on stage, you're actually predicting what kind of word is going to come next based on the words that have preceded it, which is why our brains can read so fast and so fluidly. And you don't notice that you're making these predictions. They're not at the level of conscious attention until and unless reality violates those predictions. So if the glass falls and bounces instead of shattering. Or if we get to the end of the Disney movie and the heroine dies a gruesome death.  For example, you might feel surprised and confusion, consternation, perhaps.  So a psychologist I love named Dan Gilbert has a nice way of putting this. He says that surprise tells us that we were expecting something other than what we got, even when we didn't know we were expecting anything at all. This is one of my favorite things about rationality that I think is woefully underappreciated. That people think of it as this very conscious, deliberate, deliberative process. And it certainly is sometimes, but I think if you're doing it right, a lot of the time rationality consists of these sort of felt senses in your gut that that doesn't quite sound right. Or I don't quite believe that. Or that's kind of weird or surprising. So some of the things that I've been surprised about that I've trained myself to notice. I was surprised reading C.S. Lewis. I was surprised at how thoughtful and sophisticated he was. Which I guess was just because I didn't expect a Christian apologist's writings to be so well thought out and argued. My model of the world, although I hadn't been thinking of it consciously at that point, did not allow for someone who is both a Christian apologist and such a skilled thinker and philosopher as C.S. Lewis. I was surprised recently when a friend of mine who's super analytical and empirical came back from a meditation retreat, raving about how much value he got out of meditation. And this may not have surprised you, but I just, you know, never saw much value in meditation and sort of assumed, I guess, that the people who got a lot out of it like weren't that empirically minded. And so it sort of like threw me a bit that my friend was so positive about it. And I think in general I feel that sense of surprise when someone who I expected to agree with me disagrees with me. There's plenty of people who I know are going to disagree with me, that doesn't surprise me. But the interesting ones are the people who I like expected to be, you know, on my side of the issue. And those are the ones that I sort of lean into and try to find out more, because what that means is either my model of them was wrong, which is kind of interesting, or that there's some sort of new and interesting reason not to believe what I believe that I wasn't aware of already. Early on at CIFAR when I first started teaching classes, I was surprised to notice that the ratings for my classes in the follow-up survey weren't that great, which was surprising because I'm an excellent teacher. And I just, I sort of assumed like I must have had an off day or something is what I told myself the first time. And then what I told myself the second time was I guess the people who came to the workshop this time happened to not really mesh well with my material. And I forget what I told myself the third time. But eventually I was like, why do I think I'm a good teacher? I've never actually taught before founding CIFAR. And when I thought about it, I was like, I think it's because I think what my brain was doing was, well, I'm good at speaking and I'm good at knowing stuff. And teaching is basically speaking and knowing stuff. So of course I'm a good teacher, which is not quite right. So this was actually a very useful realization because I hadn't been trying to improve my teaching since I knew I was already good at it. And I think that beliefs about ourselves, about our traits, our strengths and weaknesses and just our personality in general are particularly sticky. And so it's particularly useful to be able to notice when reality is telling you that those beliefs aren't actually true.  I can see how that would maybe be useful. But I just don't think that I'm going to notice that many. I don't think they're out there. So I disagree with you and here's why. 1954, some residents of Washington State started noticing that their cars windshields had these little dents in them as if someone had shot a BB gun or buckshot into their windshields. So they complained to the local police department. The police department, I don't know, rounded up usual suspects or whatever, but they couldn't find anyone who seemed had done it. And then the pitting epidemic started to spread to neighboring cities. More and more people started noticing that their windows now had these, the windshields had these pits on them. Still the police couldn't find the culprits. Eventually it spread to the greater Seattle metropolitan area. At its peak over 3,000 people had noticed that suddenly their windshields had these pits in them. The governor of Washington started taking it seriously. At this point it was clear it wasn't vandals. So people were starting to bring up other scientific explanations for the epidemic, like gamma rays, a change in the earth's magnetic fields. And according to this newspaper article from the time titled, Furious Thrive as Pellets Run a Muck, Aliens Kicking Rocks on to Tacoma, Washington from the Sky. Anyway, so the governor of Washington convened this panel of scientists to try to figure out what was causing these pits to appear in people's windshields. The scientists studied it and after great deliberation they concluded that's what happens when you drive a car around for more than like a year. Little debris hits your windshield. In other words, they'd been there all along and everyone's car that was like more than a couple years old had little pits in them in their windshield, but people only started noticing them when other people started reporting pits in their windshields. In other words, pits were there all the time and they were looking right through them. And this is, honestly, this describes how I feel about noticing anomalies, that it was only when I started actively looking for them that I noticed, oh there's all these things that like, whoa, I didn't expect that and huh, that's kind of weird and I hadn't been looking for them before, which I think actually has a kind of poetic justice or delicious irony to it because the problem that we're facing, the problem of our beliefs being so entrenched is due to the fact that our brains see what they expect to see based on our beliefs. And so what we're doing here is we're learning, hey, there are anomalies all around us and now that I know that I can see the anomalies all around me and so we're basically fighting confirmation bias with confirmation bias, which I just kind of like. I also think that you start to notice anomalies more and more the more you do it. This is Paul Graham, he's a programmer who created Lisp and a venture capitalist and entrepreneur and he wrote this great essay about learning to notice feelings of surprise and he compared the feeling or the process to learning history. So when you first start learning history, stuff doesn't really stick for you because you don't, you know, it's just a bunch of names and dates and places and then as you learn more and more, you have these facts to hang the new facts on and they sort of fit into the system, they're more memorable and they're more meaningful as well. And so he says, the more anomalies you've seen, the more easily you notice new ones, which means oddly enough that as you grow older, life should become more and more surprising. He also, by the way, said that he used to be very scared of flying and so he would live vicariously through his friend's trips. He would try to pepper his friends with questions when they got back from some exotic place to find out what it was like and the one question he said was most useful to him for his purpose of living vicariously was what surprised you about the place you traveled to? How is it different from what you expected? And he said even the most unobservant people are able to report interesting things when you ask them this question. So another option you have, aside from sitting back and waiting for anomalies to appear in your path is to invite the world to surprise you by making explicit predictions about what you think is going to happen. This is something I do a lot just on a very informal level. Before I ask someone a question I'll try to guess what I think they're going to say. Before I go to an event I try to predict how I'm going to like it. Before I check my teacher ratings I try to predict what they're going to be and I'm very often wrong. I'm like still surprised. And it's also sort of for extra practice helpful to notice how confident you feel in your predictions so that over time you can see what kinds of things am I overconfident about, what kinds of things am I underconfident about. This is a clip from the 2012 presidential election right before the election and it's about the Colbert Report and appearing on the show is Nate Silver who is the statistician who successfully predicted basically all of the state races in the presidential election just using statistics. So here he is appearing on the Colbert Report. Now my buddy Joe Scarborough, Joe Morning and Scarborough, you bet him a thousand dollars that your predictive model was correct. A thousand dollars that would go to Red Cross. He didn't take the bet. He didn't take the bet. The idea is that look, I used to play poker and in my world it shows you have integrity to be putting your money behind an idea that you have, right?  And Joe to his credit he did donate, make a donation on my behalf and I donated as well so it wound up being for a good cause but I think a lot of people get on TV and they say things and they don't really have any conviction behind them. It becomes a game just to entertain half the audience or the other half of the audience or whatever else, right? And we're trying to say something very simple which is that hey, go and look at the polls and take an average and then add up the states and see who has 270 electoral votes. It's not really that complicated if people treat it like it's Galileo or something, right? Something totally heretical. It's just like no, look, these polls are pretty simple little facts, right? There are many things that are much more complicated than looking at the polls and taking an average and counting to 270, right? That is the longest possible way of calling him a bullc***er. Indeed.  So this is like extra, extra practice if you want to invite the world to surprise you with what your expectations were wrong about is make bets with people. So this is something we do at CIFAR all the time if we disagree about how long something is going to take or about how well a workshop is going to do or about whether so and so is going to change their mind if we try to argue with them, et cetera. And it is striking how often when I go to put my money where my mouth is, I am surprised to notice, whoa, I don't actually believe that. This is also, by the way, in case you were wondering what the picture of Almond's was on the previous slide about prediction, this is something we do at our workshops. We make predictions about just random things to let people practice that process and one of the workshops, someone set up a prediction market about whether an almond would sink or float if you dropped it into water and this one guy bet the almond would float and he bet it with 99.9% confidence. We play with poker chips so he basically just wagered all his poker chips on that bet and so he got together and we did the test, we pulled an almond out of the jar and like with everyone watching, dropped it into a glass of water and it sank and this poor fellow lost all of his poker chips and of course everyone wanted to know, why were you so confident that the almond would float and it turned out that he had sort of snuck away ahead of time and done his own secret test when no one was looking with an almond of his own but I guess almonds have different densities so now he's our parable about overconfidence and the dangers of a sample size of one. So I've so far just been talking about how to notice anomalies, how to sort of draw them out from the world I want to talk a little bit about how to react to them, how do you respond when you see anomalies and I think one very common way to respond is to say, you know, I can explain this without having to change any part of my model of the world so to be honest the first time my friend told me that meditation was awesome and like totally changed the way he thought my first reaction was to say he probably just really liked the idea of meditation and so he's like convincing himself that it works and some people will one up this process and they'll explain to themselves why not just why the anomaly doesn't contradict their theory but why the anomaly even supports their theory so this is a picture of Japanese Americans heading off to an internment camp during World War II and at this time Governor of California Earl Warren testified to Congress that he thought he was very confident that Japanese Americans were a grave threat to our national security and when one of the congressmen pointed out that, you know, there hasn't been any signs of Sutter-Fuge from the Japanese American community, Warren replied, that only increases my confidence that they are up to something big because they are so well coordinated that they can avoid giving off any signs of Sutter-Fuge so it's like, it's going to be serious which is obviously stretching it but I feel very sympathetic to the urge to explain away anomalies rather than changing one's own model and what I think is going on is that people feel like they have two choices they can either change their mind about something serious that's maybe an entrenched belief or they can find a way to reject the new evidence or the new anomaly and changing their mind about a big thing on the spot in response to one new observation just seems like over dramatic and drastic and also maybe unpleasant and so they have to find a way to reject the anomaly I think there's a third option, it's called putting anomalies in abeyance and what it means is you discover an anomaly, you acknowledge it, you notice okay this might indicate there's something slightly wrong with one of my beliefs about the world or maybe not, maybe there's another explanation and then you move on and this might seem like a cop-out but I don't think it is because this is actually what science does, scientists discover anomalies all the time that seem to contradict established scientific theories and they notice it with interest and maybe curiosity and continue on and sometimes it turns out that the anomalies build up together and there's a shift in scientific theory this in fact is a picture of Mercury's orbit which got placed into abeyance as an anomaly because Mercury's orbit was rotating faster than Newtonian physics predicted so this was very sort of confusing to physicists but Newtonian mechanics was very well established so they just sort of said well that's confusing and didn't try to toss Newtonian mechanics out the window and they just figured eventually there will be some resolution and there was when Einstein came along, general relativity resolves that discrepancy so I think that the notion that you don't have to immediately change your mind or reject a theory that you can sort of acknowledge it and pay attention to it is actually very helpful because it eliminates some of the resistance to noticing that there are anomalies and just noticing is like a wonderful first step and if you feel like you have that freedom to notice it without being forced into anything you're much more likely to make it so this I think is a phenomenon that probably all of you have encountered in some way or fashion before where let's say you have a relative maybe your parents who maybe you don't call as often as they wish you would and when you finally do call them the first thing they say is so you're finally calling you never call why don't you call more often and you just feel worse than you already did and what your parents are doing although they don't mean to is punishing you for doing the very thing that they wish you would do more often and I think that this is what our brains do to us all the time when we notice things that might contradict our theories about the world and about ourselves so having the ability to sort of shed that stress or anxiety about a potential threat to your theories is going to allow you to actually notice them rather than training yourself not to notice I have this model that I like called the soldier and the scout these are two different ways of thinking about anomalies so in soldier mode there are your ideas and then there are the enemy's ideas and you go around with your shield and your sword to protect yourself from ideas that might threaten you and try to knock them down and as a soldier the way that you win or not lose is by not letting those enemy ideas in and I think this is a very natural intuitive model and you can see it in the way that we talk about arguments and disagreements we use battle words we talk about attacking an argument or defending an argument we talk about seeding ground in an argument the same way you seed territory we talk about stronger weak arguments like winning or losing an argument etc alternatively you could be a scout and the way that a scout wins is by coming back with as accurate a picture of the landscape as possible so scouts are in exploratory mode scouts are curious if there's something that seems like it might be wrong scouts are more curious to find out well of course it would be great if there were a bridge over that river but I better find out if there was a bridge over that river rather than just putting my shield up to any evidence that there might not be a bridge so being in scout mode I think is I don't want to say necessarily necessary but certainly crucial super important to actually successfully changing your mind I like this quote from St. Exupéry who wrote The Little Prince he says if you want to build a ship don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders instead teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea this is the mentality that I see in the people whose judgment I respect the most the people who I think are right the most often, the most thoughtful they're not doing it they're looking for anomalies and they're not doing it out of a sense of duty or a sense of like this is what I have to do to be a good skeptic or a good rationalist I have to go out and question my beliefs because they're curious they want to know what the right answer actually is so this is my exhortation to all of you to get into scout mode care about what the right answer is learn to notice things in the world that are surprising or that make you go huh or that's strange and then lean in to that surprise and confusion and curiosity and follow that trail where it leads and finally remember the most exciting phrase to hear in science the one that Harold's new discoveries is not Eureka but that's funny thank you