The What's Neat Show is sponsored by Lombard Hobbies. Your value hobby shop for over 40 years of modelers helping modelers. Big inventory, value pricing, fast shipping and great service. And by Broadway Limited Imports. The cutting edge leader in model trains. Check out their website at Broadway-limited.com. And by Bachman Trains. Now that's the way to run a railroad. Check out their website at BachmanTrains.com. And thank you for helping us support the best hobby in the world. This is What's Neat for November 2023. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month we really do have a good show in that. Tyler Haney from Bachman Industries shares with us a lot of the amazing new products they are coming out with this month and for Christmas. So this month we've got part four of the layout construction segment. I'm building that beautiful narrow gauge blackstone layout. This is a section where we actually build the turntable so that all the models can sit around off the edges of the turntable with all their sounds playing and it's an absolutely amazing thing to hear and see. Also this month as you can see I am shooting this beautiful ST-45 locomotive from Broadway Limited Imports and this model is exquisite in that it's got all the detail that you would expect plus it's got Paragon 4 sound in it so it sounds absolutely fantastic. The sound is in fact authentic because it's recorded off the ST-45 Northern Pacific locomotive number 3617 that resides at the Lake Superior Model Railroad Museum in Duluth, Minnesota. This model is going to come out with a multitude of road names. You can check out the Broadway Limited website by looking them up online and look at all the beautiful road names that they're coming out with including a bison tenial unit which is going to be really exciting. So with that I want to make sure that you do check out the What's Neat this week video podcast show that we shoot every Saturday night down here on the property trying to keep you update on what's new in the hobby with special guests in our wonderful podcast crew. Everybody's dedicated to this the best hobby in the world and so with that let's continue on with the rest of this November 2023 What's Neat. What's Neat we're talking about the Broadway Limited re-release of their water tower that's motorized with sound so check it out I'm going to hit the button now. This is a great addition for any model railroad it's DC with 12 volt or you can use it on your DC system DCC system including Digitrax and NCE this is a great addition like I said it's a re-release so get them weather hot the MSRP is $99.99 and that's a segment of What's Neat. So now we're going to pick it up in this four-part series on layout construction as we launch into building the turntable finishing the scenery and then create a bunch of amazing run-bys using this beautiful blackstone layout so sit back and enjoy part four of the Blackstone layout construction project. I've taken two 50-foot micro-engineering girder bridge sections and I've cut them down into equal spacing so that I'll have a 65 foot bridge to which we're going to build our turntable. So I measure this out with a scale H of scale ruler and I'm right at 65 and a half feet so what I'll do is I'll draw the centers and I'll draw up the ends and what we'll end up with is a bridge similar to this in shape. I've rough cut my 65 foot bridge for the turntable out of the 50-foot girders. It's going to fit right into here. There's two dimensions on this that are very important that I'm going to use for the router. The first dimension is the thick center before she tapers up to the edges. So this is the dimension that I'm set for and I want to cut a very small circle in the middle of this turntable for that dimension so that'll be right here. What I'll do is I'll take the router, we'll router out this circle first and then we'll router out the second circle to the depth of this and carve it up from bottom to the edge with a knife and feather out the circle so that we have a perfect turntable pit made to order 65 foot just what we need for this diorama. Let's do that. Alright, because this is still sectional this is wonderful. I can router it not on the layout. The bridge is what dictates the depth of how deep we're routering. Right now I'm going to do the center section of the bridge right here which will be a small hole. Then I'm going to go around and do the outside hole and then we're going to carve out the difference in the bowl real simple. For the center section, twist. Now I'm going to set the router to the depth of the outside and if you're going to allow for wheels then you're going to set yours just a little bit deeper than what this girder is in length so you got clearance for your wheels and then you're going to build in your track your inside rail so you want to leave a height for your inside rail if you want to do that. This router and get down here and set the depth and I'm going to leave an outside rail. I'm going to carve the circle and do that with the router too. You get it important you get this one right. Out of your circle I like to take a piece of styrene and slice it and just put it on the inside. It gives a nice smooth round edge. I'm doing my final depth now because I'm going to make the rail, the edge of the concrete the rail is going to sit on. So I'm going to take this and I'm going to go just deep enough to allow for my rail height, pretty edge inside the turntable. Bridge fits right in there. I've got the stepped edge around the edge. We'll clean this up with a styrene and have a perfect little display area for the models. That's how you do that. Okay, I painted a diorama of the turntable pit with some brown paint so it's easier to see, to visualize and it is the pink foam. I've roughed in the turntable bridge and I've got a microphone jack here so that the turntable will have power in it at all times by plugging it into this jack and it'll rotate. It'll be a manual turntable just like the prototype. Now how did I get it up to this point? What you see here, what I did was I took the sides of a piece of wood, about a half inch wide piece of wood, scrap wood and I took the bridge parts and I drew a line and traced them onto the wood. Then I run it through the bandsaw to cut it to shape and then I test fit everything just to make sure that the pieces fit together. I drilled a hole in the center of the wood where the microphone jack would be in underneath and I test fit this jack for power just to make sure it's going to fit. Everything works. I drilled a hole in the pit in the bottom of the turntable pit so that it would accept a female microphone jack. I cut a piece of plexiglass disc, just a small piece of scrap plexiglass so that the female jack could plug into the bottom of the pit. I cut space with a hot foam cutter so that the plexiglass and everything would fit smooth into the bottom of the pit. Then I wet the bridge. I applied some gorilla glue to it so as this expands it'll be tightly glued, the sides will be glued onto the wood and then I set it up with some clamps and I used these clamps and just let it sit for about three hours and that brings me up to the point up to where we are right now where I've got the bridge fitting in here nicely and then the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to lay wooden ties across the bridge, spike some rail on top of the bridge and I still needed to do some finish work to the pit. I still got to go back and glue my styrene in on the sides and then take some spackling compound and just smooth everything real nice and smooth so that everything fits, everything rotates so it's moving along very quickly now. Now there's a couple tips I want to share with you on laying the track on the bridge and that is this, since the bridge itself is made of hard wood underneath and it's glued together so you don't want to apply full pressure when you're spiking into the bridge. What I always like to do is take a dremel and I've got a slow speed variac on this so that I can drill the holes in the wood prior to spiking so that once you've got the holes drilled then all you've got to do is easily put your spike in and you can adjust the position of the rail by turning the spike head a little bit either to the left or to the right and allow the spike head to help keep the rail straight all throughout the bridge. So I've got one rail laid and I've got another piece of rail here cut just to lay on top of the bridge and then we'll finish it off with the woodwork, the boards that go across the top and then color it. Okay, here's a photograph I'm using for reference to build this turntable and this is in the RGS story volume number 10 and I'm going to talk about books and reference materials in this video a little later on. Now that we've gotten the rails mounted to the bridge I'm able to put a level, run a track on each side of the turntable pit, put a weight on top and what this does is this makes sure everything's level, flat and true in both directions and the reason that's important is because I put glue all over the center plexiglass now to glue in the center pivot point and that will dictate how we tweak the rest of this turntable bowl out with regards to putting in the plexiglass sides and making sure all the rails line up just perfect. At this point we can shorten and lengthen rails on each side of the bridge. There's a lot of little tweaking that can be done because this is a precision device. This has actually got to operate by hand in circles and be smooth so that's why we're going to this great effort just to make sure that the bridge sets in. Now this is going to sit like this overnight while that glue dries. Okay, now so now the epoxy what I did was I put some three minute epoxy in this just to set it up a lot quicker so I wouldn't have to wait until overnight so this is approximately two hours later and now I have got everything set up the table is completely level and I spun it around just to make sure I've got track here to make sure the distances are exactly the same from one end to the other as it spins around so essentially now what I need to do is I'm going to take this top I'll put some planks on it to match the prototype photo that I'm following the nice glued down wooden planks then I'm going to take this and I'm going to stain it make it all dark make it look kind of nice and then I'm going to take these tracks and I'm going to glue them all the way around the outside of the pit in their positions of where they're going to be so that everything lines up when you line of eyesight it up the turntable so that'll ensure that I'll have eight tracks here the next thing that I need to do is to smooth out the inside of the bowl with some sparkling compound I need to put in the styrene around the edge to give a nice concrete edge I'm going to run a piece of track through the bandsaw and then as you see when I fold it inside the turntable it wraps all the way around and becomes my rail which will help level the bridge I need to work on the bottom of the bridge here I still haven't actually soldered the wires from each pole here and onto each rail I've got to do that and then attach this screw this back in the lip keeps it in the same position every time so it's always level so I'll screw that in tight put a little glue on the threads as you work perfect now to start the electrical I need to make a control panel and what I'm what I've got here is I've got drawn eight tracks and we're all put the switches and then a center double pull double throw switch for the turntables bridge so that we can reverse polarity on that that's very important so that when you turn a steam locomotive around you don't short out when you start pulling into the tracks here because as soon as this bridge turns your engine around your polarity is then crossed so we'll put a double pole double throw electrical switch in here to reverse the polarity in the bridge so every time you turn it around one time the polarity will match the tracks going out that's just something to think about now I've got my control panel the plexiglass is a piece of scrap plex and I'm going to draw the shape of the control panel with this marker and I'm use a french curve to get me started because the back side is going to be similar to a roundhouse curve so I'm going to curve it around like this I just want to bring it all the way around here and that's where we'll have a straight tangent at that point same for up here I'm going to bring this around my French curve out here real nice so I have a nice curve that doesn't interfere with the turntable pit and then all I have to do is draw straight tangents on the back sides a line here and the line probably like right here okay you can see I've got the turntable control panel drawn I'll put it against this white piece of paper it will be very easy to make out so now what I've got to do is I've got to cut this out on the saw all the way around then I'm going to drill holes where it'll accept the switches for all eight tracks and then the center switch for the double pole double throw where the turntable pit will go okay I've got a handful of small micro switches from Radio Shack to install on this project so what we'll do is we'll test fit those switches into each hole make sure everything fits and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to take some tape and I'm going to put tape on this plexiglass on the underneath side and it's going to follow each one of the tracks and then I'm going to take it and I'm going to paint it all black and then when you see that I remove the tape we'll take what is left that hasn't been painted and paint that either with gold I'm not sure what color I'm going to use yet but spray over some paint on that and what you'll end up with is the pattern of the track work on your plexiglass plexiglass control panel ready to be reinstalled back onto the layout and it's going to look really nice and here's what our turntable control panel looks like with all the switches installed these are simply on and off switches now this is going to be wired up the exact same way that we wired the side panels there's going to be a continuous wire that runs from each one of these so every switch has got power into it and then the other terminal will go straight to each turntable track rail so that we'll be able to have on and off capabilities to turn off each section of the turntable so that if we want to shut down the locomotives we can do that now this I took a hot foam cutter and I cut out just a small area right here exactly the way we did the side panels and this will lay right into the top of the turntable area one of the thing I want to talk about is a double pole double throw switch it's got six terminals on it so that when we flip it this way the turntable bridge will have negative positive polarity in each rail when we flip it the other way the polarity will change the way we wire that up is very simple I want to show you this on this paper illustration power pack wires are coming in to the first two terminals these terminals go out to the track we're gonna run a wire cross to each terminal like this and what that'll allow is when the flip switch is flipped one way we'll have power plus minus when the switch is flipped the other way because this cross parallels then this will change to plus and this will change to minus so that we can change the polarity in the turntable bridge the whole turntable unit itself is self-contained all the wiring on this is completely going to be self-contained so that when we drop this into place on the layout we'll only have to connect to power wires and we're gonna connect the power wires to each side of the rails that are coming in to the turntable pit and the reason for that is these rails will always remain hot and so if I wire up two hot wires into the control panel to direct the power into each one of these tracks exactly like we wired up the blocks on the yard sections because it's all self-contained once it's wired up it'll simply get dropped into place glued in and then we'll start the scenic the top of everything I used the hot foam cutter and I cut out a few grooves in the bottom area of the turntable pit so that it'll accept the wires now I took the hot power off the main line instead of taking it off of the approach track because the main line here will always be hot so these two wires when they're soldered onto the turntable section itself the turntable will then have power the whole diorama itself will have power now I've got everything wired up just like the other panels on all the sightings where I've got my common electrical power it comes in through these two wire leads and it'll be connected to the double throw double pull double throw switch here which will give me power to everything this will power up everything and every one of these wires leads off to one of the tracks on the other side all the wires are soldered in my common wire the power all the tracks is run through this line and then each individual rail that's gonna be controlled with a block runs through this channel so everything's clean now I'm gonna take a little bit of tape and I'll put it down over this area to prevent the foam that we're going to use to glue this all in together with what we'll do is after I put this control panel in and I've got plenty of room now for all these wires this will go in there real nice and clean test run everything make sure that every track works run the locomotives through every track run them over the turntable bridge and that'll bring me to the point where once I know it works I can come back and I can fill this cavity with foam fill it up get a nice coating of foam then we'll take turntable section that's completely finished now self-contained with two wires soldered to it we'll tuck the wires down inside their appropriate grooves and we'll put the turntable down in place where it belongs and put some heavy weights on it so that as the foam starts to expand and fill the cavities underneath and it moves through the sides and start to fill the side cavities nothing will move everything will be permanent you won't have to access the wires anymore everything will function and be a permanent entity what we'll do after that is this will get us ready to do all the dirt and the final scenery to finish off this okay everything set up overnight and the foam is dry the turntable is in everything is solid and permanently mounted all I've got to do now is go around the edges and I'm gonna cut off all the foam that grew out of the edge expanded filled the cracks and oozed out the tops so this section is completely glued in tight now the control panel is not glued in yet I'm gonna keep this out and I'm gonna put dirt on the whole scene kind of make it blend in with the rest of the surroundings then I'm gonna run through and paint very slowly and carefully put some black ballast down along the track some cinders and just make the whole area look appropriate to that of an engine service facility where you've got a lot of cinders just kind of just cluttered dirty nice looking realistic type of a ground texture for the turntable pit and that pretty much finishes this layout there's not a there's not anything really to do except for small vignette scenes add a few little people maybe a couple of buildings here and there but really this is the layout it's complete no layouts ever complete you'll always bind something to add something to change something to tweak and scenery but the way it is the way it stands now we started out with what was going to be a photoprop a simple loop and it's turned into a completely operational layout that would look nice in any den any man cave or any family room this is its own complete layout from start to finish on this video you watch me build that now with regards to the mountains I know I said I was going to go back and change Mount schnevels a little bit I still may do that but the way the layout turned out now I'm not so I'm not so keen on getting a run by I don't need a run by what we have now as a complete project so thank you very much for watching this video I hope you've received and gotten something really good out of it that's going to help you with your layout building skills every one of the skills that we've applied to this construction diorama of this layout can be applied to any scale any scale HO scale and scale all of these tips and techniques can be used for your modeling future so I hope you take away something from this thank you very much for watching to finish out this DVD I want to talk about the reference materials that I use that helped in building this layout I also want to end it with about 15 or 20 minutes of good run by so you can see the layout operating outside in natural light so enjoy that but first let's talk about the historical stuff first the RGS story this 12 volume set of books is priceless they're available on eBay I think a settle such a bag about thousand bucks by the time you get all 12 volumes but what's in here are every mile of the Rio Grande Southern railroad all 160 some miles of this railroad are covered in these books mile by mile I mean you can look at drawings of trestles we used the drawings of the turntables to build a turntable on the way out I covers locomotive 455 and it's great accident that they have all that information is in the Rio Grande Southern stories 12 volumes another good set of books that covers just the Rio Grande is trails along the combine there's a lot of about nine or ten volumes of this book I've got nine of them right here and in these books you'll read about creed the city the wooden the last of the outpost it was built up literally a value of a and it burned it went right up the canyon the fire took out the whole town you'll read about that kind of stuff well priceless set of books now Mallory Hope Farrell did the Silver San Juan this was one of the first books on the Rio Grande Southern and another one by Josie Moore Crumb was Rio Grande Southern story these books are also available on eBay there's a lot of priceless information in here that would help you with understanding how the railroads ran and a lot of drawings and plans Mallory Hope Farrell also did narrow gauge country this isn't a magnificent book it's got a lot of great black and white photography that is again a priceless resource the last sets of books I'm gonna talk about is Robert Richardson has done Rio Grande volumes one two and three real grand's volume one and two simply cover the real grand railroad and then volume three covers the real grand Southern a lot of photographs that you don't find in any of the other books are in these books last set of books to talk about is Richard Dormins the real grand Southern volume one and volume two these are some great books you can find them on eBay super plans all sorts of pictures that you don't find any other reference material if you can get this type of material for yourself this is gonna go a long way in helping you understand how the railroad operated which will help you understand how to design your layout I know I've said this once I hope you enjoy this DVD I hope you've learned something from it it's gonna be two hours and 17 minutes of fun so enjoy the next few run buys here it's about 18 or 20 run buys coming up and thank you very much for watching this segment of what's neat I'm sitting here with Tyler Haney from Bachman Industries in beautiful Philadelphia Pennsylvania for this November with an update on some of the amazing products that we modelers are going to be able to enjoy Tyler how are you today it's good to hear from you I'm doing very well Ken it's good to see you great to be back on the show awesome you've got a lot of exciting stuff that you're probably gonna want to talk about today absolutely we've got some recent releases on an HO scale on n scale these are items that have arrived to the Bachman warehouse that are now available from Bachman or at your local hobby shop with what exception which I'm gonna lead off with and because this is a pretty exciting product this is the return of our HO scale 4 to 4 Turner not GE 44 10 locomotive this was something we announced a couple years ago and this is the first time we've done it with DCC and sound on board and took us a while you know to go through development and still in on going to development to get sound on board it's such a tiny little locomotive but we were able to do it this has soundtracks tsunami 2 on board it's our first locomotive with tsunami 2 so it's very you know premium high quality 16-bit sound package on board with all the authentic GE sounds okay and this is one of the paint schemes we're doing in this run the Union Pacific they had 144 Turner which we have right here I've got two more as well we've got Amtrak you know Amtrak has been very popular for us the last few years so this is the Amtrak number 1000 it was used as a shop switcher at the Beach Grove shops how cool passenger cars that's way cool yeah absolutely you know something a little bit different you know it's another side of Amtrak besides just the passenger strange that that everybody knows well with over 50 years now of Amtrak in existence here in this country and all of the beautiful different types of locomotives we've seen over the years in passenger trains and shop equipment and switchers an individual could actually just model Amtrak on their layout and I've always enjoyed the idea of doing that myself absolutely yeah Amtrak you know has a really fun fun thing but rare to model and operate for sure I have one more of the upcoming forty four Turner paint schemes here and this is the Strasburg railroad from right here in Pennsylvania a very popular scenic railroad this is their number 33 locomotive which was their only diesel locomotive not their only but they operated on freight trains and some passenger trains from the 1960s all the way up through the 2010s this is a paint scheme that at war I believe in the 1970s for the 1990s cool and then there's two more as well which I don't have right here Baltimore and Ohio and Santa Fe so we have five paint schemes being offered and these will be out early next year and I'm just guessing Santa Fe will be in the Tiger stripe that's correct how nice yeah so that's our upcoming product that we wanted to share today okay then we also have some recent releases here right here we have a very famous very popular locomotive of course the Whirlpool can Western J class in HO scale yes they are now back in stock just arrived a couple of weeks ago and this is a special release right here this is the 611 the last surviving Whirlpool can Western J of course in preservation and in operation bring it up a little bit and this is the Spirit of Rowanoke version yes bring it up a little bit hard to see but you can see right below the cab window it's got the Spirit of Rowanoke lettering that it's worn ever since it returned to operation about 10 years ago very cool yeah bring that up a little bit higher on camera absolutely there you go your dead center that is absolutely beautiful and I can see that's got a shine to it a sheen so it's the excursion shiny the way they kept it for excursion service that's correct nice and shiny and glossy that's beautiful this is our like I said this is our latest release besides the Spirit of Rowanoke we also have 611 in its traditional 1940s and 1950s era paint and number 613 as well okay and these also have soundtracks economy on board for the first time in this most recent release so those are available now got a couple more recent HO arrivals right here our HO scale northeastern caboose we've got two new paint schemes for that we have the western and maryland red white and black that named the circus slavery so this will be a perfect complement to the western maryland gp40 that we released a year or two ago all right pretty sharp looking paint scheme from the late 1960s yes we also have a new haven here in the mcginnis black white and orange okay very attractive looking caboose was a little bit of an uncommon scheme I believe there were only three that were painted in this exact arrangement with the yellow ends the orange doors and trim it's another very cool looking car yes available now so that's what I have for this month for HO and then we also got some n-scale releases as well I'm going to move the J side right here so I can show you our n-scale baltimore and Ohio EM1 which is back in stock obviously a very big impressive locomotive 2884 raise that up a little bit there you go yeah sure thing perfect sorry I'm a little bit far away from the camera but yeah these were exclusively owned and designed and owned by the baltimore and Ohio unfortunately none of them survived into preservation but you know we know the articulated steam locomotives are very popular your big boys your challengers so this is something along those same lines but a little bit different uh east coast and it's a bachman exclusive so this is the number 7606 and we also have a 7628 I believe is the other row number very beautiful two new row numbers these have soundtracks economy on board and they are back in stock it looks very much like the HO scale model you had come out with about 10 11 years ago absolutely yeah both of them are spectrum quality levels are absolute highest end both detailed locomotives that we offer right I think that was back in 2013 we filmed those outside running and got some beautiful beautiful photography of the HO scale models and I think I weathered one of those to make it just look gorgeous yeah I remember seeing the uh the photographs of that it looked looked beautiful god HO scale version has been out of line for a while but you know we always say never say never maybe we'll see it again in the coming years I love that about Bachman absolutely and I got a couple of freight cars to show off here as well okay this is our 50 foot track cleaning plug door box car in end scale for those of you who are familiar with with it this has a dry cleaning track pad attached to the bottom of it so it's perfect to roll around your layout and clean off the dirt and residue on your rails make sure your trains are operating smoothly so we've got two new paint schemes for this car in stock now this right here you know it might be a little bit hard to see what's going on on this side of the car so I'm going to flip it around oh this is Canadian National and as you can see it's got different paint schemes on either side of the car this was part of a promotion Canadian National was doing to show off the different you know commodities that they hauled on their freight trains so the other side has the in black and white it's got all different mass heads from Canadian newspapers to show that this box car was specially built for hauling newspaper paper nice yes and you folks might be familiar with this Canadian National cylindrical hopper which has the rainbow on one side and is just a regular Canadian National on the other so these were part of the same promotional campaign and were using a display train for a while so I think these are pretty cool cars you know if you want to work on recreating that train and it's you know it's basically two cars in one you can show off depending on how you have it set up on your layout you can show off the flashy side or you can go with the more traditional Canadian National colors that's cool yeah and I have one more track cleaning car as well great northern cushioned ride okay and they're very distinctive green and red colors with rocky the goat on the side very nice so there you go they're very attractive looking cars and they're useful as well for cleaning your railroad and then finally uh I showed these off I believe the first time I was on the show if you can uh the pre-production version and they're now in stock and I have some painted samples here of our n-scale animated stock car we've offered this car before in HO and large scale and it's just you know it's not realistic we'll admit that but it's just pure fun yes as this car goes around curves on your layout the little animal heads will bob in and out of the sides of the car this Union Pacific car has cows inside of it bobbing their heads in and out we've also got Christmas coming up in just a couple of weeks one the Saras here's our north pole in southern with the reindeer transport nice little reindeer bobbing their heads in and out and just to not leave out you know the folks who uh wanted to stick with a traditional stock car the prototypical our regular n-scale stock car is back in stock as well uh this has been upgraded with body mounted couplers and we've got four paint schemes we've got the Pennsylvania here got a couple more if I reach over here we have a Canadian national and we have the Baltimore and Ohio pretty nice sharp looking with the silver roof and New York central as well so animated stock cars and regular stock cars all are back in stock or I guess these are new rivals not not back in stock they're in stock for the first time so all that stuff is ready it's a order from your hobby shop or purchase from your hobby shop or you can order directory from bachlin so there you go and Lombard hobbies help support this show and that's the go-to source absolutely so is that what we have for the month of november I have one more thing actually uh we've got like I said we've got Christmas coming up around the corner and so our friends over at minards uh hardware stores yes they've been we've been working with them the past few years you know with special train sets uh just in time for Christmas so right here's one of our exclusive uh minards train sets uh an HO scale they should be in stock at minards uh in their stores and on their website minards.com by the time this airs very so this is the eagle express with the CSX GP 40 it's got three freight cars and the caboose and it's also got some accessories here you've got your people you've got your telephone poles you've got your railroad signs so it's a nice way to you know not only get your train set uh up and running uh but you know start building out the scenery as well there you go and then over here got the midwest limited uh this features the chicago and northwestern railroad we've got an f7 and matching caboose and a cp rail box car in the pennsylvania gondola so I imagine a lot of these people uh watching this you know our experienced modelers but if you're looking to you know maybe get your son or daughter or friends in the model reality for the first time those minards uh exclusive train sets are a great way to get started that is so that's what I've got for uh for this month Tyler I want to thank you so much for being on the show uh today and showing us all the beautiful eye candy and so with that that is this segment for what's neat all of the products seen on this episode of what's neat are available from lombard hobbies in lombard illinois or order online at lombard hobby dot com and by broadway limited imports the cutting edge leader in model trains check out their website at broadway dash limited dot com bachman trains now that's the way to run a railroad check out their website at bachman trains dot com


Hello, my self Sachin Rathod working as assistant professor in mechanical engineering department from Walsh Institute of Technology, Sollapur. Today we will discuss the bit that is the selection of the belt part 6 from the course machine design one, the learning outcome. The learning outcome of this session is the learner will able to understand the constructions of cross bell drive. So, already in the previous part we had seen the construction of the open bell drive. Now, we will see the construction of the cross drive. So, from these figures you are getting that the two pulleys are there on which the belt is going to mount in the cross manner. The cross bell drive is used when the sense of the rotation of both pulleys are in opposite directions. Means suppose your the input pulley is rotated in the clockwise direction, your the output pulley will get rotated in the opposite direction that is in the anticlockwise direction. So, if the rotations required in the transmission of the power in the opposite we can use the cross bell drive. The angle of the wrap is more in case of the cross bell drive, the wrap angle is more as compared to the open bell drive. So, because of the wrap angle is more, the power transmitting capacity is more. In case of the cross bell drive, the belts rub against itself while crossing. Therefore, the wear rate increases which reduces the life of the belt. So, if you observe at this section the two belts are rub or the wear will get occurs. So, the life of this belt is less as compared to the open bell drive. Sorry, now we will see the construction of cross bell drive. What are the various terms or the various parameter they are going to use in the cross bell drive that we will see in this slide. So, here through these figures we are getting that this is the alpha s is nothing but the wrap angle for the smaller pulley. Next alpha b is nothing but the wrap angle for the larger pulley. So, you can pause this video and think about this. What is been by a wrap angle or how it will get affect on the power transmission of the belt. Next d is nothing but diameter of the larger pulley, small d is nothing but the diameter of the smaller pulley. d is nothing but the centre distance between these two pulley that the dimensions all were taken in the millimetre. Now, we will solve this construction of the cross bell drive through finding the length of the belt. So, if you observe the triangle o g o 1, I will use the pointer for showing that. So, if you observe this triangle o g o 1, just I will draw simply that triangle. So, in this triangle o g o 1, we are getting the sin beta the value of this angle sin beta is equal to opposite side that is o g o 1 divided by hypotenuse o o 1.   Therefore, sin beta is equal to capital D plus small d divided by twice c also the alpha s that is a wrap angle for the smaller pulley. The wrap angle for the smaller pulley is nothing but this angle 180 plus beta plus this beta. So, 180 plus twice beta you will get the wrap angle for the smaller pulley is equal to pi plus 2 beta and the wrap angle for the larger pulley is nothing but total 180 degree plus beta plus beta. Therefore, we are getting 180 plus twice beta plus therefore, we are getting 180 plus twice beta is equal to pi plus twice beta. Therefore, we can easily find out the length of the belt. So, from this figures you will get the length of the belt is nothing but the arc FAB plus arc length BC plus arc CDE plus length EF. So, like this way we are getting the length of the belt.  EF is nothing but again we can write down it as a OG. Just I have rewritten that equations once again. So just put the value of alpha s and alpha B where the alpha s is equal to pi plus twice beta and alpha B is equal to pi plus twice beta. Therefore, put that value of the alpha s and alpha B in the above equations you will get this equation and also you will put the value of OG. The length OG is nothing but we are getting O O 1 cos beta you will get the value of the OG just put that OG value C cos beta here also C cos beta. Therefore, just multiply this equation inside you will get this equation for the length of the belt. Again we have to get the parameter that is a capital D and small d together by considering the pi by 2 against the beta terms together. So you will get this new equation for the length of the belt. Again we can call this equation number 1. Again we have to simplify by considering that we are knowing sin beta is equal to capital D by small d divided by twice C. For the small angle at the beta we can call sin beta is equal to beta is equal to capital D plus small d divided by twice C and we are knowing that cos beta is equal to 1 minus 2 times sin square beta by 2. Just simplify this equation by putting the value of the beta that the sin beta is equal to capital D by twice C that the sin square beta by 2 is nothing but the beta square by 4. Again we have to multiply by 2 that is why I have written beta square by 2. Put the value of the beta beta is equal to capital D plus small d divided by twice C in this equations you will get this equation. So put the value of the beta and the cos beta in the equation number 1. So if I put that value in the equation number 1, this is the equation number 1 put the value of the beta and cos beta. So we have to put the value of the beta and the cos beta in this equation. So you will get this equation. Just I have put the value of the beta and cos beta. Again since you have to just multiply this 2 bracket and you will get the simplified manner. So we are getting these equations after multiplying terms. So just again we are going to simplify this equation. So finally we are getting this equation for finding the length of the cross bell drive. So this is the derivations for getting the value of length of the cross bell drive. So for this slide I have taken a reference from the VB Bhandari book from the design of machine element. So thank you.


In fact, I think we should start now. Hello, welcome everyone. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm glad to see you here today. We have a community session, which is always one of my favorite, and I'm really glad to see you. For years, our main practice on the forum has been to invite one person up here, sometimes a couple or three or more, but a guest in order to take a dive into their expertise, to learn from their experience and what they are focusing on and what they're working on. But every so often, we take a break from that tradition. Instead of a normal guest, the guest is all of you. We bring all of you together in order for us to collectively think about the future of higher education from each of our standpoints, from each of our perspectives, from the point of view of our individual work. And that is something which I find emotionally very powerful and very satisfying. And I'm really grateful to do it today. Today, the occasion is the start of the fall 2022 semester. And so what I would love to do is hear from each of you what you think, what you're looking for, what you're anticipating, what does the future academic year hold for you? In order to get things going, let me clear this out of the way, in order to get things rolling, I'm just gonna share a couple of thoughts based on my research, what I'm seeing right now. And then I'll open the floor to all of you. So please at any point feel free to chime in with something that I'm saying or to go completely in a different direction. Again, this is an open mic and open floor for all of you to participate in. And by the way, as we've been doing for the past few months, our good friend Wesson or Dolmski is here and they will help you if you have any technical glitches. So please ping Wesson if you have any issues at all. Let me just mention a couple of the trends that I'm tracking right now. And then I'll turn it over to you. So one that is very, very important is economic. That is many nations in the world, especially Europe and the United States have been enduring an interesting kind of opposing trend. On the one hand, we've been enjoying very, very low unemployment rates. On the other hand, we're suffering from unusually high inflation rates. The eurozone has been hit especially hard on this. And we know that there are many, many problems and dangers caused by inflation, including pressures in higher education upward on tuition, as well as making it more difficult for families to be able to afford tuition and other payments. In terms of the unemployment rate, it seems that this is potentially causing people to not necessarily enroll in higher education because the job market looks so much more competitive. A lot of data, a lot of complexity in that, but it's an interesting pressure on all of us, as we especially as colleges and universities try to recruit students. So those two issues are very interesting. Also, by the way, am I going too fast, too slow, just right? Give us a response in the chat. Lisa says, good, Lisa's tough to please. So I've got to be happy with that. A second point that just came up in the chat from Ed and Carolyn, is that of long COVID? So let me get to that. We have short code, if you will. We still have the dangers of infection and different campuses are responding in different ways. They have different regulations. Within the United States, the Biden administration is ramping down its COVID efforts. The pandemic is still pandemic. It is still killing several hundred people a day in the United States and sickening some much larger number than that. In fact, I'm here in Georgetown's campus. We are required to be masked in all classrooms. Now I'm not in the classroom right now and I'm also by myself, so I'm happily removing the mask so you can hear my dulcet tones more effectively. But that's just one example. So we still have these issues and the long COVID issue is one that is just growing salience. So of course, long COVID refers to the tissue damage suffered by people. Some number of people, maybe 10 to be 20% of people have been infected and the tissue damage can occur in multiple places in the body, including the brain and the nervous system, leading to brain fog or memory issues or coordination issues or joint pain. It can also affect other organs leading to, for example, difficulty breathing or heart problems. And the heart problems may be actually quite severe. One of the reasons this is a major issue is first, some number of academics, students, faculty, staff, have long COVID and that is going to affect their performance and what they do. So think about what happens if you've got an administrator who has brain fog or what happens to a professor who is just perpetually wracked with joint pain or what happens to people who have to retire early because either you have heart problems or brain functioning. All of that plus the fact that there is emotional and personal pain and suffering as a result of this. So that's one piece of the impact. Second is a possibility of this may change the work environment as well. If we have some degree of the workforce that is weakened or driven out by long COVID, again, that impacts unemployment and that impacts how we prepare students for the workforce. And third problem with this is that we may see medical costs go up even further because this means tens of millions of people potentially within the United States have long COVID who exert greater pressure and have more needs for medications, treatments, all kinds of therapies. So we may see that problem as well. So I'm tracking this as closely as I can. There's a great deal of complexity and we also don't have really good data about COVID in higher education. I would love to hear more and more of your thoughts about this. In the chat, Carolyn says, there was an article on LinkedIn about compassionate re-enrollment from Kim McNutt at CSU Dominguez Hills. Students may be stopping out due to long COVID, medical costs and the usual reasons. Carolyn, if you can, as a librarian, if you can find that link, that would be great to see. I'm not saying, wow, that's a happy story. I'm saying it's very, very important to see that. So this is a good point, especially as we're trying to keep students enrolled. So COVID, in addition to macroeconomics, let me add to this as well some of the interesting dynamics that are happening now around demographics. Some of you know demographics is something that I obsess over and I've been researching for some time. There have been some interesting developments of late. One is that we are seeing the American lifespan drop seriously by something like three or four years. This is primarily as a result of COVID, which especially kills older people, as well as a continuing problem, the nightmare problem of deaths of despair, mostly due to alcohol as well as other forms of substance abuse. So while the American birth rate continues to lower, it may be that our mortality is beginning to accelerate as well, which is an awful thing. The second issue along with that is there has finally been some interesting public traction around issues of fertility. I'm seeing more politicians, more thought leaders, more people in the nonprofit space and some business people, most notoriously, Elon Musk expressing anxiety about falling birth rates. And so this is a political third rail to grapple with. It's very, very challenging, but I would expect to see more and more of that continue and there's no sign of American birth rates going back up. Now the usual way that we have accounted for that were balanced that I was by immigration. And of course, immigration is not being that great either. Oh, thank you, Carolyn for sharing that in the chat. Thank you very much. Deborah says, they have a new president who has implemented a stricter standards academically for students at her small college. So numbers are down and students in her courses seem to really want to be a college and to learn. They're all in person. Interesting, Deborah. So the quantity is lower, but the quality, at least of interest, is higher. By the way, Deborah, tell us what you're teaching. Also in the chat, Tom Heymans, we need to meet students where they are in order to stem the role of declines. We assume far too long that they would seek us out. If higher ed is increasingly seen as optional, then we can't assume they're gonna make the effort. So just really, really quickly. This is an absolutely good point, very, very important. Over the summer, I published a piece which got some attention about the idea that a major consensus seems to be shattering. So in the United States from the early 80s, up until a couple of years ago, we had a pretty solid cultural consensus that the more people go to college, the better. The more college experience a person gets, the better. And this was a bipartisan consensus. It was across all geographies. It appeared in everything from national politics down to high school guidance counselors to employers. It seems of late the consensus began to break down in a few ways. You're seeing it politically with more and more Republican skepticism about higher education, not just Republican, but also independence and Democrats. But we're also seeing more and more anxiety, of course, over student debt. And I'll get to student debt in just a minute. But all, plus we're also seeing some interesting anxieties about the quality of higher education. So it may be that COVID kind of hit that with a hammer and now we're starting to see that consensus begin to weaken so that not everybody is convinced everybody should go to college. Ed noticed that in addition to lower immigration, there's a huge backlog in USBs and processing worldwide which may reduce international student numbers. Indeed, indeed, agreed. And Sergio Costa says, on my mind, at my school, enrollment for in-person is down. Online and synchronous, all popular. I am concerned that the push to reach old goals and practices, there is limited interest in 100% in person. Afraid we're not building on upscaling what we did. I assume Sergio, even by upscaling, you mean the increasing skills of teaching online and learning online. Yeah, I'm seeing examples of that across the country. That's a major, major issue. Thank you, Sergio. In fact, before I go much further, I'm gonna make it easier for you to all join me on stage if you like. This big teal of color box, this is a daring move on my part. If you press that button, it beams you on stage right away. I don't have to do anything. So you can just stumble on stage, or leap on stage, climb on up as you like. I'm happy to keep reading aloud from the chat, but I'm also happy to hear your voices and to see your faces. Deborah, thanks for telling me about the classes. I'm glad you're Emerita, but also glad to see you teaching English. Now, the student debt issue is, of course, a huge one because the Biden administration announced by executive order a new plan to forgive some chunk of student debt. I don't wanna go into all the details right here, although if you don't like, we can explore them together. The key thing is forgiving up to $10,000 in debt, up to 20,000 for those who have certain health conditions with an income limit. So people over a certain amount of income are not eligible for it. This has become a huge political firestorm. Already there are Republican ads and think pieces, Democratic ads and think pieces. There's a real question about how popular or unpopular this is and how it will play out in polling matters because we have a major American legislative election coming up in November. So that is a major, major issue. I'm gonna mention one last point and then I wanna turn it over all to all of you. And that has to do with geopolitics because right now the United States is engaged in some kind of new Cold War-ish experience with two world powers, with Russia, over Ukraine, and with China over a variety of issues, including Taiwan. And the reason I'm mentioning this is because this impacts higher education in a few ways. One is that we've seen different academic units around the world try to distance themselves from Russia and to much smaller extent, Belarus. Everything from closing joint programs to making a show of not teaching Dostoevsky. So we're seeing some of that. And we're also seeing the obverse of that, which is academics trying to help Ukrainians who are academics who are fleeing their country for safety or who are in country and trying to be supported. So that's one part of what's happening with geopolitics in the higher ed. The other is the Biden administration is continuing now a decade-long American stance of opposition to China, which has played out in some interesting ways. Already, there are noises that Americans shouldn't collaborate with Chinese researchers on certain key themes and fields, namely advanced technologies, biotechnology, AI, et cetera. There's also the US trying to build up an alliance across the world. So it may be that we see more international collaboration, sorry, collaboration or cooperation with countries in those alliances. And we may also see at some point a decline in the number of Chinese students who come to the United States. There've been some interesting numbers about that already. It's a little unclear in part because of the other reason that Ed Webb mentioned about visas, but we may see this big battle across the Pacific play out in higher education. So those are a few of the trends that I'm tracking. I'm gonna go through the chat here and pull up some of the topics that you have all come up with. And if you would like to comment, again, remember in the bottom of the screen we have all those different buttons. So just if you want to type in a question that you want me to flash on the screen, hit that in the Q&A box. And if you want to join us and you're feeling bold, press that teal color button next to me.  So going through the chat here, Caroline Coward has mentioned, part of her work is in open science, finding a new metric to measure the influence of published research beyond the age index, citation numbers, and journal impact factor. Is there a better way to judge the effect of riskology work? Yeah, that's a great topic. And there's kind of two that are evolved here and they're both really, really powerful. One is that measurement issue and there's a lot of debate about what kind of metric we use, measure impact and some of the metrics are published by companies and there's debate about each of them. And I haven't seen one that strides forth as uniformly universally accepted yet, but we need something better. But the other is open science. And we're seeing this both in terms of open access and the scholar of the publication as well as open education resources. Open access, excuse me. Just got a boost from the Biden administration where the Office of Science Technology Policy just issued a directive that previously the federal government had a policy of encouraging, if not requiring, all scientists who create scientific research and federal funds have to publish their research in open format within 12 months. It was a kind of 12 month embargo period or the OSTP just removed that embargo. So if Carolyn and her colleagues work on a project about, say, planetary mechanics and it's published, it has to go open right now. So that's a federal push for open right there. Open access continues to grow, OER continues to grow. There's a lot, a lot of power for that. Flipside is what Ed Webb just pointed out. And my thanks to Ed for sharing that. That he's tired, he's exhausted. And I think this is true across the board in academia. So many of us have been for the past nearly three years now being asked to do a lot more under increasingly bad conditions and in some cases of a lot less. Thanks to the COVID pandemic, thanks to the anxieties and dread, experiences felt by our students, as well as the political turmoil within the United States. There's a strong sense that academia is being pressed to the breaking point. I hear you, Ed. I wish I could give you a big hug to help you keep going. Just wanna say for you personally, Ed, your puppy is unbelievably cheerful and always does me good to see a Instagram shot. Lisa Chimeson says, yeah, I thought it was just me. No, Deborah agrees. We're weary. And Roxanne brings in a related point here. Hello, Roxanne. Noticing the reported teacher shortage in K through 12. And it doesn't seem to be at all impacting a higher ed right now. Yeah, I'm interested in that disconnect. In fact, not to keep going back to national politics, but the Biden administration this week announced that it was gonna be working with private providers to try to beat the bushes in order to get more and more candidates for K through 12 teacher jobs, but did not reach out to higher education, teacher ed programs in order to do more of the same. And I haven't seen any new activity in teacher ed and higher ed along those lines. Although if anyone has, please let me know. But this ties in neatly, I think, Roxanne to the unemployment rate being low where a lot of workers feel a bit more empowered in order to demand better conditions or better jobs. Plus we have K through 12 teachers who are suffering the same kind of exhaustion and weariness that we all are at higher ed. Plus they're suffering the real direct brunt of a lot of politicalization of education right now. I'm glad you mentioned that. John Hollenbeck wants us, and John, good futures comment here. Give it a year or two. This could be the next crisis as K through 12 teachers leave the classroom. Yeah. Now it may be that a lot of local and state governments feel that demographics are driving this, that the demand, the number of students may be smaller. But this is something we have to really work hard on. Of course it takes time to produce a teacher who can teach in those levels. Let me scroll back a little bit more and find some more. But first, Philip Lingard wants to join us. So let me bring Philip up on stage. Hello. Hello. Good evening. Just picking up on the shortage of K-12 teachers, there is a particular section which is the English for foreign language, the EFL section, which I don't know what it's like in the States, but in Europe, UK, Ireland, Malta, more than 50% of the EFL teachers have left the profession. Because during COVID, obviously the EFL is entirely private, so therefore they laid off the teachers. The teachers are well-capable of getting other jobs, and they have done so, and so they haven't come back. And that is creating a huge amount of pressure at a time that your English students beginning to come back internationally, but they're simply on the teachers there to teach them. Wow. I thought that that's the same in the States. My sense, Philip, I haven't gotten a sense that, well, in the US called ESL, English is the second language, I haven't seen the same kind of drop that severely. But this is something for me to look for, and I would love to hear from other people, if anybody else has noticed, in particular this decline. I wonder too, Philip, about how much of the decline is caused by native English speakers, Britain, Canada, the US, not traveling abroad because of COVID and not finding ESL jobs like that. I think it's broad. The whole industry just effectively all shut down in 2020 and didn't reopen in 2021. So that's two years gone by when people who either had their lives arranged around teaching during the peak summer period, but that was with additional incomes than normal teaching. They've simply reorganized their lives. And certainly, the figures, I'd say in the three countries I'm aware of, molten UK and Ireland, are dramatic. They say easily 5%. And they don't know where they're coming back from, because whilst obviously unemployment is higher in Europe, unemployment has also fallen dramatically here in the same way it has in the States. So there isn't that buffer of unemployed who would be thinking of taking English teaching tuition and doing the qualifications to come into the industry. What's the, what was Marx's term, the reserve army of the unemployed? Yes. No, that's very interesting. I just tweeted this out, so I'm going to look to see if anybody has any instances of this. And in the chat, people have related comments, but none that directly bear on this. Evilde, I have to say, I miss Malta. I haven't been there for a few years, and I would love to know that. Indeed, yes. I've never seen you here. Well, thank you. And thank you for raising that. If I may, just one other point. Looking at the UK, the UK is going through an extraordinary difficult time. And I think that the university sector is likely to run into very severe trouble. All institutions are facing huge financial pressures. I mean, some of my chances of talking about the price of tuition going up from 9,000 pounds a year to 24,000 pounds a year because of the problem, but also the impact of Brexit. Almost certainly, we're going to see this trust become Prime Minister, and she will then pursue the end of the Northern Ireland protocol. And the direct impact of that is that Britain will be off horizon altogether. And that will have a huge impact in terms of the British research standing and the British universities. There could be enormous disruption in higher education in the UK. What's the time frame for settling in with a new Prime Minister? Well, I mean, 5th of September is when, I mean, almost certainly it's a trust, is when she will be announced as an UPM. OK. So it's only four days away. Well, that's a huge issue, especially given Britain's extraordinarily influential role, both in terms of research worldwide and, of course, teaching students both at home and abroad. That's something, thank you. We should look hard at the trust and where she'll take us. And I'll try to avoid all the bad puns involving her name. I'll have to watch that in the image. I mean, something to keep an eye on. Absolutely. There is, I think, there is an incipient crisis. It's not there now. 12 months from now, it could be a huge crisis. Well, my best wishes to you, Philip. And I hope you weather that crisis. And thank you for sharing it with us. I'm still OK. Pleasure. We have, again, if you're new to the forum, by the way, and I think I don't know if any of you are, but if you are, that's an example of a video question. So anyone can just join us like that, which is very easy. And it's, of course, great to hear and see everybody. But the chat box is on fire. People are just putting in comments of all kinds. Tom Hames is getting us, as usual, to do deep thinking about the purpose of higher education. And Suzanne, sorry. So I'm trying to read this. And I'm actually having a hard time with my screen. So I don't want to mangle your last name. It's hard for me to read. I think Suzanne Trelko says, the valuable quality of higher education and education in general have been significantly derided by certain groups in the US. Yeah, that's part of what I was talking about, the shattered consensus that the benefits of higher education, the perception that there are benefits is beginning to slide. Vanessa Vale, hello Vanessa, says students, faculty, and prospective future faculty are on pause to see what happens next and changes before jumping in the deep end. What a great comment. What a great description of our moment. So we don't have a clear decisive change happening. We haven't declared, for example, COVID to be over. The war in Ukraine continues. We have the tensions I mentioned before still rumbling. Being on pause, waiting to see what happens next. It's like we're in a phase change about to switch over. Thank you Vanessa, thank you. And again, if Evan else would like to join me on stage, I'll open the open podium there. And of course you can also just click the raised hand, but also type something in the Q&A box if you'd like something to be splashed across the screen as well as read out loud. We have Lisa Durf asks us to think about what if high school went for online asynchronous and offer community centers instead of school and those teachers were shifted down grades. All undergraduate teacher ed programs prepared us to teach anything back in my day. Is it still the same? A great idea and great observation. Thank you Lisa. And thank you for tweeting out Lisa, really appreciate that. There's also talk here about some of the credentialing of K through 12 teachers. Carolyn Coward mentions, I think what's going on in Florida of Governor DeSantis pushing for military veterans to be able to teach K through 12 more easily with fewer hoops to jump through. And also Joseph says there's a movement toward technological tools and self teaching and learning. Shorted teacher is adding fuel to that. Quite true Joseph, quite true. Now, if I can just ask, where about the halfway point of our session? And we're talking about the major forces reshaping higher education. Can I ask what you are personally expecting from the next academic year? For example, are you looking forward to changing your student population? Are you seeing a major shift in your own work in some way? Are there connections between the different trends we've been talking about that play a direct role in your life? Just to give you a weird example, in my own case, I'm teaching two classes this semester. Supermajority of students are international, which is really exciting, very interesting. Also getting my new book out, which is available for pre-order already. I'll tell you more about that as we get closer. But I'm also traveling to more and more speaking and consulting gigs. I haven't been doing that for the past year, but it seems like a lot of in-person work is ahead. So I'm going to be in New York, I'm going to be in Illinois, I'm going to be in South America. So those are little signs of changes in my life and seeing those connections there. How about the rest of you? What kind of personal future do you see for the next year? The awesome George station response to Vanessa's on pause comment on the anecdotal level that I think he's saying his first time freshman engagement is slower and different. By the end of the second week, the 18 year old are just settling in. I guess George, that means they're taking longer to settle in than before. Debra says she's expecting more online graduate education. So much interest in that now. They hear that, especially as it's more and more, well, we have more proof of concept, more and more use of it. Ed Webb notes that Dickinson has significant focus on sustainability and international education. He teaches a bit in both or a lot in both. Great programming this year around the IPCC report and around sustainable development goals. He's concerned about whether a study of broad programs can recover post COVID. By the way, Ed, hopefully I'll see you next month going to Carlisle for a IPCC event. I'm looking forward to that very, very much. How about the rest of you in terms of either sustainability programs locally, but also in terms of international, excuse me, study abroad? Are you seeing any uptick in that or any changes in that? George answers my question. Yes, it's taking longer to settle in and they're hardly connecting with each other, except for athletes who I'm guessing already have an extra amount of socialization. That's very important, George. I don't have enough data on my end personally to experience that. Our program is also, it's a very small program, so it's a lot easier for us to socialize, but we'll have to keep an eye out for that. John Hollenbeck says that he's interested in how Khan and others such free curricula are marketing themselves as remedial and preparatory resources for students returning to school. Yeah, that's a really good question because they are free and available material and if you're struggling with algebra or biology, the stuff is there and that's a really good use of it. Ed mentions that they have lots of international students on campus as usual and lots of international content. Their number of studying abroad is significantly down, so that's for him and for Dickinson, that's primarily study abroad. So the students haven't recovered yet. And then Tom, all right, this is just unfair. I have not yet brought Tom on stage and I just, every day I have to do that, every week I have to bring Tom on stage. It's just part of the program and I think he'll appreciate my shirt color today because Tom asked a huge question and I want to give him a chance to voice it out loud. Tom, is that a new microphone and boom mic? Not that new, I've had it since January or so. Maybe I may just keep it out of screen, I don't know. Yeah, it looks good. Yeah, well, thanks. It was recommended to me by our mutual friend, Ruben. But yeah, I like it. I think it has pretty good sound quality too, so. No, are you trying to get me to ask the question I put in chat? But regularly. Yeah, I mean, it just seems like, you know, all of the things you're talking about, this slow deterioration of enrollment, problems with international students contributing to that. A lot of people, you know, this idea that maybe college isn't for everyone that you were writing about this summer. At some point, somebody's gonna have to ask the question, you know, is what's going on here?  It's gonna happen, you know, it's math, right?  So, you know, but what are you gonna do about it? And, you know, the question there is, how do you expand the audience? You know, if our only prime audience is 18 to 24, of a percentage of 18 to 24 that are quote unquote, college ready or whatever college, you know, capable or whatever you wanna call it, then that number is gonna shrink.  How do you change the informal nature of education so that institutions support that over much longer periods of time as a revenue stream, for instance, you know, things like that are not really being discussed. And on top of that, you get this slap in the face that we call COVID and the pandemic and remote teaching and all that sort of stuff going on.  And the problem with technology, as I like to say, is that it shows the emperor with no clothes because this stuff was all being recorded. Before, these people were probably doing the same things in their classrooms and the students were sort of nodding and going along with it and everything, you know. How do I pass the test? And that's all it really matters, right? And do you learn anything? And occasionally you run across a great teacher who goes above and beyond and changes the way you think about things. But that's a luck shot, you know. I could probably count those people from my own academic experience on one hand out of the dozens and dozens of teachers and professors I had in my academic career. So, you know, this, there's something completely amiss with the way the system treats the way we think about learning and teaching. There's the disconnect. I actually just posted a blog on the Shaping EDU site about open loop learning versus closed loop learning and the fact that I'm kind, that I'm, I constantly, what's really come snap in the face again. I mean, this is not a new thing, but you know, this semester, at this, at the beginning of the semester as I try to explain how my class works and my class is very much built on this idea of, which I stole from Doug Engelbart of Collective IQ and that we need to strive toward the margins and try to do things and grow as learners. And my students are like, well, just tell me what you want me to write so I can pass. And that's a product of closed loop learning.   And so, you know, and in higher education, you get to a point where it's voluntary. And there are people I know that ask, why would I pay to have this inflicted on me when I didn't like it, when it was inflicted on me for free in K-12, you know? And so, these are all hard questions that I don't think anybody's really looking at. And, you know, I kind of wonder, you know, I'm thinking about systems theory and systemic change. You know, what is it gonna take for, you would think that COVID would have just knocked things off kilter enough. And maybe it will, maybe it's just a delayed reaction. But I, the trend I see now is actually, in a lot of ways, there's a big push to go back to quote unquote normal. And I don't know if we can do that. I don't know if we have the teachers for it either. That's the other question. We're losing the people who can run the system too. That's the one, unusual, Tom, you've said several great things and I wanna grab them. And friends, I would love to hear your responses to Tom even better. Tom and I talk every day and I'm sure he's bored of what I have to say, but you mentioned one key structural component, which is that if we have a lot of faculty and staff right now who are not interested in doing something bold and exciting in terms of teaching, and on top of that, as we established earlier, a lot of us are worn out, exhausted from the past few years. Well, how do we go about changing that? And so the one hand you have how do you transform the faculty who are currently working, but then how do you add more into the mix? And we know it takes years to develop faculty at a college level. So it may be that that's a long-term problem and that we have to, so we need some kind of massive amount of professional development, but at the same time we have to do it a way which doesn't burn people right out because we have so much of that dread and pain right now. I think we need to deconstruct teaching and think real hard about what you do in the course of a general semester and ask yourself how much of that is, has to be done by you as a faculty member? How much of that is specialized in a way that has to do with your discipline or what you're trying to teach and how much of that is just pushing papers and or pushing content, right? Which is out there anyway. One of the things I've done in my classes is I've moved almost all of the content out of the live sessions. We rarely talk about content except as it relates to the projects we're working on. We bring it in, but I don't start that way and it's all in my canvas shell, it's all recorded. And you just, if you need to know that, then you watch, watch it. And what I'm giving them in person sessions is how to learn and how to process the information, how to do things cool with it, how to build communication and stuff like that. How much of that can we use technology to distribute to where we got, we can put the experts doing expert things as opposed to doing dumb things? A quick question from the chat, clarifying question came from George Station. Deconstructing versus unbundling, can you clarify? Well, when I'm saying deconstructing is I'm saying analyzing. Unbumbling applies action, but when I'm saying deconstructing, I'm saying, I did an exercise a number of years ago where I very carefully took every piece of my class or the way I teach and say, what exactly am I doing here? What's my intent here? How can I use technology to ease the workload? So to speak on me so that I'm not, so that I can concentrate on the student rather than the workload. And so that's a complicated process and it's a self inventory. That's what I consider deconstructing. Unbundling is the second part of that where you take that information and you say, okay, these are the parts that I need to do alive. These are the parts where I need to be having a conversation with you. A live conversation where we can talk back and forth. These are the parts where I don't need to be having a live conversation where you're sitting in the back of the room sleeping. So I'm gonna put those parts where you can watch them when you're awake and when you're mentally ready to engage and then I'm gonna leave the other parts in the classroom. And my classes are a lot more efficient. I spend, I actually use this as an opportunity to break up my classes into two halves so that I'm dealing with smaller groups of students and each group only meets for half of the class time and the other half is online. And so I can essentially teach a 32 person class like it's a 16 person class, which helps a lot.  But we have comments that came in the chat. I wanna make sure in these I think directly. One is from Joseph who says, I'm not really pivoting anymore. The barriers between work and personal life are dissolving with online teaching. I am outside the LMS as much as in teaching, whoops, sorry, teaching on closed social media networks, the expectations from my students of a 24 seven availability is real. I just wanna, if you wanna respond to that. Well, I mean, you gotta set expectations with your students. I mean, I say, look, you know, I try to get back to you within 24 hours, but I sleep between the hours of 11 and five or something or 10 and five. So I'm not gonna answer an email at that point unless I have insomnia. Every so often I do. And I'm sure I surprised the heck at them because I'm like, I'm at two o'clock in the morning and I can't sleep. But as I get older, that becomes more common. You know, but no, I mean, I definitely set boundaries in terms of availability. I also schedule individual time into my class time. So every week, a couple of weeks during the semester I canceled the group classes and I meet with every student individually. And instead, and I set that up as a scheduled time. And so that time is, and I prioritize listening to them during that time, these are the, and a lot of times I get stuff from students who don't normally talk in the group sessions, you know, and I can concentrate on, hey, this is what I see you struggling with. And that's immensely valuable because I can really target. That's another part of efficiency is targeting the learning. As opposed to. Yeah. So, John, I don't work 18 hours in a row. I work, you know, I say, look, I've got a reasonable expectation of response time. If I happen to respond at eight o'clock because I'm sitting in front of the TV and watching a baseball game and I'm not really doing anything else. Yeah, I can sit back and send an email. But I don't feel, I don't feel enslaved by that in any way. And if I'm gonna leave Tanon for an extended, if I'm gonna be traveling or something like that, I'll tell the students, I'll say, look, you know, I'm gonna be unavailable because I'm gonna be on a plane or something like that. Just be aware and I'll get back to you as quick as I can. And I've not had a problem with that. And I don't feel like it, it's not about, everybody talks about the work bleeding into your, into your personal life. And I've never really felt that as being, I have personal life during the day. I don't work nine to five in an office where people are watching me all the time to make sure I'm not playing solitaire or something. And so during the day, I'll take breaks, I'll go do something else for a while. Like everybody does at work and they just don't tell you about it. The reality is you just sort of integrate it all into an overall flow. And there are times when you do say, and I'm sorry I'm shutting this off. Well, I think you're, I think you're ahead of everybody on this. I have a similar life and similar structure. But there's a question. I had a conversation. Oh, I was good. Real quick, I had a conversation with another faculty member this morning as part of a oral history thing we're doing on the pandemic. And she said something really amazing in the sense that, you know, in the digital world, time changes. And we, if we, if we expect it to conform to the way it used to work, it's a little like evaluating aircraft on the basis of trains. And so we have to sort of think a little differently about how we don't work eight to five anymore. You know, we have little chunks of work here and there and there and there. And then we spread that in between the stuff. You know, so I mean, it's a different mentality. We don't punch the clock. Sorry, go ahead. You need to send me that naval war gaming title that you were recommending me before, I missed it. Charles Roberts, speaking of war gaming, and he hates it when I keep saying this to him. Charles Roberts says, in history in some other fields, you've got something like a one out of four chance of putting a tenure track job with a PhD. I'm not sure how much you can encourage bold instruction in a published and still probably parish environment. You know, the biggest proportion of faculty in the U.S. are adjunct, you know, the majority are holding the track. And so it's, I guess, from some of the research we've seen, that if administrations ask adjuncts to be bold, they become bold because that's a condition for hire. But again, we're running into problems of supply and exhaustion. But I run into disconnects on the same front. I mean, in the sense that I had a situation this summer where I had a long conversation with an ADA counselor who was trying to figure out a different way to make my course work. And I'm like, it doesn't work a different, it's a design process, you know? And so were there alternative assignments? No, but the assignments I do give are not timed and they're not set up in a way that would, I've never had problems with students with disabilities in this class. And as a matter of fact, every ADA letter I've gotten since I've redesigned my class, I've basically ignored because they're all about extended test times. Well, give tests, so that's not an issue. So I mean, but the idea that you're doing something very different from the normal flow is a real challenge, not just for the students to wrap their heads around, but also for administrations and things like contact hours, you know, how many contact hours, how do you measure butts and seats when there are no seats, when there are no chairs? We're gonna come back to that topic, I think. Tom, let me that you are doing your chair in peace. And thank you, thank you, Adore, for coming on stage.  And I just want to, I want to hoist a few of these up because I think they're awesome. Lisa Durf, a committed teacher says if a student pops up in teams, yeah, she'll answer them. Deborah says that she's done individual visits and small groups for 30 years now. So you, Deborah, are another person ahead of the crowd. Excellent. And it drew real criticism at her three year review many years ago. Now no one questions it. It's always the challenge of doing something new. Always that challenge. Thank you, Deborah. And then there was a, oh gosh, a whole series of comments. This chat is just terrific. George answers one of my questions. Thank you, George. And then Carolyn Coward points out, you don't need to teach facts. Facts can be found anywhere. Expertise is teaching context, analysis, understanding and next level thinking. Absolutely, absolutely. And then Don mentions being haunted by my comment about this opportunity we have for doing bold and creative rethinking of higher ed yet we're overwhelmed. And he asks a really, really good kind of leadership question. Is there a way to identify the innovators and run interference so they can meet this moment? Yeah, run interference and really support them. That's a good question, Don. I wonder how that might play out at your institution. We have more comments that are coming in and people are just talking back and forth which I love and it's great to see. I'm gonna try and sum things up if I can a bit. It seems that all of you are seeing certain things happening over the next year and certain things not happening. So you're talking about exhaustion, fatigue, a sense of overwhelm. You're talking about students who are coming to us some for the first time with some disconnect as a result of the COVID years. Some of you are also talking about different ways of teaching and being creative about teaching that may or may not be supported. And yet at the same time, there's the sense that we're in a strange kind of interzone, a kind of interstitial moment where we don't have a clear direction forward and it's not clear what is actually happening in a major way. And that gives a lot of us pause and makes it more difficult for some in order to do something experimental and new. It may be that some of the giant trends I was talking about at the very beginning of the hour are playing a role here in terms of everything from the economic stresses to some of the flows of international students and geopolitics. But this is definitely a moment that has a lot of possibility. Josh Kim last year found a interesting article which called for us to avoid a snapback that was a sense of trying to imaginatively drive teaching and learning back to fall 2019, maybe January 2020.  And we have to not let that snapback happen. I think that's a useful phrase and important I desire. Charles Roberts in the chat says optimistically, while by mostly first-generation students do seem less prepared for college, they also seem excited to get to it. That's good, that excitement can make up for a lot of that. Carolyn says, we're in the zip disk VHS era of higher education, the transitional and uncomfortable phase. Carolyn, yes, we're in the era of jazz drives and scuzzy drives. Yeah, yeah. Don says, he's seeing the snapback and I need to wrap things up because we're just at the end of the hour. I shared something in chat before, just really quickly. The Dickinson College event that I mentioned before about sustainability, we have, there's a nice website for this and I'll do this in the chat. I'll be there, I hope Ed Webb will be there and I would love to hear of anybody who wants to come to it, taking a look at climate change and higher education. So there's a link there in the chat and if you'd like to look at it. You know, I usually summarize the, or wrap up a feature transform session by sharing a few slides and I don't do that out of reflex, I do it out of deliberation. What we're talking about is vital for higher education and I would love to continue this conversation and that's why I put this slide up. Some people can tweet like Lisa Durf, sorry, you've been doing and of course at my blog, where it'd be great to see you if you want to pursue this further still. We've been talking about a lot of these issues over the past few years. We've had a whole run of COVID sessions, for example, we've had multiple sessions on faculty development and a bunch of sessions on students and of course throughout been thinking about how to restructure higher education for the 21st century, for the present day. So we have all those recordings that are available and we're continuing to explore more and more topics coming up.  We've got a bold plan to reimagine higher education along with secondary education. We have more sessions on COVID and the climate crisis coming up so you can register for those. And I would still really, really like to hear about any of the things that you're doing or anything that you're seeing. Just shoot me a note and I'd be glad to share with everybody else here. Now, I don't know about you. I love these sessions. They feel smaller and yet more intimate. I love just that we can explore what we're thinking about directly in the community. And I'm really grateful for all of you for taking the time and brainpower to do that. Thank you all. We can do another one of these, perhaps December or January, depending. If you have any suggestions for that, please let me know. But again, as I say at the end of every session, please take care, please be safe. I love you all dearly and I wanna make sure that you survive and keep doing your great work within higher education. Until next time, we'll see you online. Take care. Bye-bye.