The title of this talk is going to be the Timbergen Legacy and Ancestral Health. Why Medicine Needs the Ultimate Level of Analysis. And I'll just talk a little bit about who Nico Timbergen was. He was a Dutchman born in 1907, lived until 1988. Can everyone hear me okay? Is this good? Okay. He went to Leiden University, which is I think where Dan Party went at some point. It was his alma mater. He became a professor of biology at Oxford University. And he pioneered, he and a handful of other people, really pioneered the field called ethology, which is sort of a British branch of animal behavior science that really sort of laid the foundation for what we now know as animal behavior or behavioral ecology. So amazingly he was the joint recipient of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Medicine, along with Carl von Frisch and Conrad Lorenz. He pioneered the use of photography and later video and field work, which he laid the foundations for really the idea that we could like make nature documentary and that photography could be used to collect data in wild populations of animals. And he developed the concepts of what's called a supernormal stimulus or supernormal stimuli and then physiological traps and as well as this four questions approach, all of which I'm going to talk about. I'm going to talk about supernormal stimuli and physiological traps briefly. I mentioned those last year and George Diggs, if you've ever gone to any of George Diggs presentations in the past at AHS, he's talked about those a lot. And these are concepts I think we in the ancestral health community could start using more, maybe employing and starting seeing how these things that were originally these concepts, these conceptual tools originally developed in animal behavior and evolutionary biology could be used to help us get a better grasp and describe better what some of the phenomena are that we identify. So these are a couple of books either written or co-authored, authored or co-authored by Nico Timbergen or written about him. Those two on the right there, Timbergen's legacy and Nico's nature are like biographies or academic edited volumes based on his work. So before I talk about the four questions analysis, I'll mention briefly again, you know, one of the most interesting concepts that he developed was the idea of a super or normal stimulus which happens when the intensity, duration, or frequency of a stimulus is greater than that that would occur in nature. And so thus inducing the organism to respond in like an abnormally intense manner. So the volume in a sense of a stimulus is greater than it would have ever occurred throughout the species evolutionary history. So the species never had to evolve sort of a breaking mechanism and so it just responds in an out of control fashion to the loudness or the intensity of this signal. And that can happen in the modern world often as you can imagine. I'll talk about that more in a second. But then sometimes often in association with the super normal stimuli, you can get what Nico Timbergen called physiological traps which happened when an organism makes a series of maladaptive choices despite the availability of better options based on novel often super normal stimuli. Sometimes there's a whole literature I've discovered recently that talk about this the same process, but it sometimes may be called ecological or evolutionary or sensory traps. I've seen the term OVA position traps for talking about how insects can erroneously OVA posit their eggs onto like solar panels or windows and things. So, you know, but this is the same concept of a trap. This the mechanism this is not Timbergen's work directly but it's sort of in from his intellectual descendants. This came out in a paper a couple years ago by Robertson Bruce Robertson and Chalfoon. If you notice, you know the horizontal axis there the fitness value of resources resources resource normally throughout evolutionary history that would, you know, the preference that an organism would would evolve to have in response to given some object in the environment would be, you know, positively correlated with its fitness payoff, typical fitness payoff, right? A big chunk of food is going to be way more attractive. It's going to cause the organism to have way more preference than a small chunk of food or a, you know, an immediate sex partner is going to be for a high level of preference as opposed to one very distant or not present, right? So that's what normally happens. There's a, you know, preference increases with the value of the resource. Well, in modern environments or novel environments, you can get a decoupling from that such that if you see the upper left hand quadrant there, the maladaptive evolutionary trap region, that's where the, for whatever reason, the organism responds in a way that the preference is still high. But if you look down on the horizontal axis, the fitness value is very low. Alternatively, you know, on the bottom right hand quadrant there, you could have like an area in which you have a maladaptive situation where there are undervalued resources. So that, you know, the, you have low, low preference for something. But if you were to prefer that, that entity or that thing, it would in fact carry a lot of adaptive value. And so I want, I would like for people in the ancestral health community to start thinking about ways that this might help us understand better what's going on in the modern environment. You can imagine a lot of the hyper-palatable foods that people talk about. You know, it's like there's somewhere on that left side like an evolutionary trap or those creating evolutionary traps where you have like high preference for Oreo cookies, right? But the fitness value, the nutritional value is very low. Same way with pornography or drug use even. It's a way to think about evolutionary novel stimuli like that. And likewise, the bottom right hand corner there, I'm thinking, one of the examples I could think of there might be exercise. Exercise has a high fitness value. But in the modern world where our lives are so comfortable, we're not forced to exercise. We undervalue it. So we have very low preference for exercise just intrinsically. And so if we're freed from the necessity to exercise, we don't value it as much as its fitness value is actually worth. Okay? So that's a basic concept. But really this is getting on to the main crux of my talk here. The four questions model. Basically, Tim Bergen based on some ideas from Julian Huxley and Conrad Lorenz and people like that. Tim Bergen sort of wrote this paper in 1963 on aims and methods of ethology. And this kind of allowed both the field of ethology to sort of gel into a theoretically more or less complete science. And it also gave us the four questions model, which I think is very useful. The four questions involved in Michael Roses here, he pointed out that this is actually very similar to the four causes of Aristotle. And so people have noted that Tim Bergen may have essentially plagiarized a bit from Aristotle. I don't know. That would get us into a different topic. But it is similar. But in any case, so if you look at this diagram here, you have on the left hand side there like you have two levels of what are called proximate level explanations. Like the mechanistic and the developmental. And these proximate questions like our questions about how, how something works, how the red blood cell works, right? Or how the auditory system works, right? And then on the right hand side, you have the ultimate questions. The questions of like what are the survival, what's the survival value of a biological system? What is it doing for the organism at that moment? And then also like the evolutionary history or the phylogenetic history of a trait. This is like, why is it that an organism has red blood cells? Like, you know, what's it doing? Like, why do they have it? Why do they have it at this moment? What are they doing now? And how does that relate to the evolutionary history or the ultimate like Darwinian endeavors there? So these are questions about like how versus why? Well, in 2013, Bateson and Leyland wrote a paper sort of after the 50 year anniversary of Tim Bergen's famous paper. And it's called the Tim Bergen's Four Questions in Appreciation and an Update. This came out in the Journal of Trends of Evolution and Ecology 2013. And they point out that we, one system that we know kind of a pretty fair amount about all four of these levels. In, is the example of birdsong. Like, why do birds sing? How and why is it that birds sing? Well, we know the mechanistic levels. The mechanism is the level of analysis involving the physiological, anatomical and neurological sort of mechanistic details involved. You know, we know that birds sing because their throats, their lungs and their mouth parts, their gadgets are working in such and such way, all driven by nerve signals and hormonal status. You know, gene expression pathways, et cetera. Right? You know, so that's what happens at the approximate level. We know sort of a little bit about the development, like how it occurs in the ontogeny of the individual baby bird that's growing up. This is the level of analysis involving, you know, the activation of genes after zygote formation, you know, during embryological development or over the course of an individual's lifespan. For instance, sometimes birds learn how to produce better songs based on hearing other conspecifics and their environment sing. And this graph here is sort of showing the acoustic properties of a chefinch bird song produced normally. Like, this is the wild chefinch. This is how the upper graph there shows you how the, what the acoustic properties would look like of a, you know, a normally developed chefinch bird song. And then the lower one shows the acoustic properties of a chefinch reared in isolation that did not hear, you know, its conspecific sing. And so it developed bird song, but it differs. You could think of that as sort of like an environmental mutation in a way. Like, chefinches evolved to always hear birds sing. But so it never had to evolve a way of, say, producing song in the absence of bird song because almost every chefinch that's ever been born throughout evolutionary history could do so in the presence of other, you know, like a learning environment. So that, but, you know, you get weird experimenters that lock them up in cages and, you know, they develop a little bit abnormally. That can be thought of as an environmental mutation to use a term that Lida Cosmides came up with. Getting on to the ultimate another, the current utility survival value. This is the level of analysis involving the adaptive function. What is the adaptive function to the organism? You know, like, what is this Darwinian function in a way that, for instance, birds sing because it advertises their location, status, their health, their territoriality, et cetera. It serves the both to ward off rivals and attract mates. Like, that's the current utility. And of course, it may, this is an area, I'll just mention this briefly, an ancestral health. We might want to always keep in mind, like, what was the, just because a trait is manifest nowadays, it may not be serving the same utility in the modern environment that it did in the ancestral environment. So that's how one way that mismatch might manifest itself at that level. And then finally, like phylogeny, like, why does a bird sing? Well, it's, you know, it's, it could sing because it came from a clade of, like, nearby neighboring species that, you know, it's neighboring species on a, and it's like evolutionary family tree or such that they, you know, it inherited it from their ancestors. And their ancestors have just passed it alone. There's been no selection pressure to take it out. So that it's not that any of these levels are wrong. In fact, this is, this is a lot of confusion when people in, I think, all across the biological sciences, not just in medicine and health. But I've noticed this with, even within in my own, my own department at the university, when I talk, I'm talking to somebody in the cellular and molecular biology part of the department.  The two sides are talking past each other. And this is just even more exasperated when, when those of us try to talk to baby people who are experts in cell biology or their medical doctors really involved in cutting edge research at some, some specific proximate level question. You know, it's like the two sides are talking past each other. It's not that anybody is wrong, really.  It really, you need all four of these levels, both levels of proximate and both levels of ultimate. Okay. So let's, let's step back a second and look at a concrete example. Okay. Let's look at an example of a mismatch effect happening in nature. Some of you, I mean, I've heard about the sea turtle example, a number of hands, probably the people that have been bombarded with this example. So sea turtle hatchlings, you know, evolve to use moonlight as a navigational aid to get off the beach and into the water. Right. The first mission that a sea turtle hatchling has in its life is to get the hell off the beach because bad things can happen to it on the beach. It can dive dehydration. It can get eaten by raccoons or sea birds. You know, it has flippers. It's not designed to live on land. It needs to get off the beach. Okay. Well, for millions of years, you know, moonlight was the only source of light that would have been present in its environment that could have been used as like a navigational cue to help the hatchlings get out of the nest. The first challenge of life is to find, okay, which way is the water? Which way do I go? For millions of years, the moonlight reflecting off the ocean would have been a statistically recurrent feature of the environment. Every environment in what's been called the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. It would have been a statistically reliable cue that their genes could hone in on. And so they evolved that as their main navigational cue. Well, you can imagine what happens now with artificial environments, right? Humans merely 100 years ago, pretty much. And a lot of coastal environments, especially around Florida, which is where about 90% of all sea turtles in the continental United States hatch. There's a lot of beach lights. Well, you know, those beach lights emit light from the blue portion of the spectrum, much like the moonlight. So the turtles, you know, never evolved ways of filtering out that environmental noise now, right? That light pollution, right? So they oftentimes wander around on the beach and die of dehydration and exhaustion or exposure or predation, right? This is a problem. This is a major conservation problem in biology. Well, again, it turns out that they suspected that it was actually not just the light in general. This is what the sea turtle conservancy did. They suspected that maybe it's not just the light in general, but it's the light from the blue portion of the spectrum that's most sensitive to the sea turtle, the baby sea turtles. So what the sea turtle conservancy have done, they've done some heroic efforts really at changing the spectral properties of the light. The lighting that's coming from beach houses and parking lights. What you see on the left hand side, that's what the external, nocturnal lighting was out, looked like before they changed the light bulbs. And there on the right is after the light changes were put into place. People can still have their beach houses, but you know, this is kind of a biohack, right? It's pretty clever. Then parties can appreciate this kind of thing, right? It's in the back there. So they were able to drive the hatchlings, the number of hatchlings getting caught in these extremely strange traps down to zero. I saw this data. You can watch a nice little four minute video about this if you follow that link to the sea turtle conservancy YouTube channel. They talked about how they were able to actually successfully fix this problem through this biohack, right? So this is the sort of a thought experiment. Okay, based on what we've seen thus far in the Timbergen four levels. Okay, imagine if you were given the task, if you were a conservation biologist, and you were given the task of solving this problem, this conservation biology problem with the turtles. But except you were limited in that you had all the tools of cellular and molecular biology, but none of the tools from ecology, evolution, or behavior. You've got to really imagine what it's like to not have those tools in your intellectual toolkit. But you're perhaps a Nobel Prize winning cellular or molecular biologist. So you have just approximate level tools at hand, but none of the ultimate level. What would this really look like? I mean, I'm thinking this may be a bit of a reductio auto absurdum argument, but it looks like you might get lost in a sort of a confusing morass of cellular and molecular biology. Patterns of gene expression, signaling pathways, neurophysiology, variation among individuals in terms of how rapidly they desiccate or dry out on the beach. You might spend all your time and money developing pharmaceutical treatments for the effects of prolonged periods on the beach. Instead of trying to figure out why the sea turtles are getting disoriented, you might spend money and time putting together papers that show this particular drug is effective in this population of sea turtles versus that one. I mean, that would be the sort of thing you could very well do. You might literally spend decades looking for the solution to this problem and never really get to the root cause, which is evolutionary mismatch. And it involves having the tools that are available when you know ecology, evolution, and behavior. And they are essentially the tools of the ultimate why level questions in Tim Berger's framework there. This is what you would get stuck doing. And you would write all your papers about a subset of this complex morass of reactions. These metabolic pathways and signaling pathways and gene expressions and transcriptomics and such. I mean, it's not that these things don't exist. They obviously are very real. They are entities in the universe. These are processes that are really happening. But it's just making it exceedingly complex and it's really not the place to perhaps be looking. This sounds kind of radical and perhaps it is because the Incentral Health model is trying to get at using all four tools that are made possible by Tim Berger's framework. They are both the ultimate questions and the approximate level. And that's one of the things that first got me into the Incentral Health scene. I noticed that people were talking about the nitty-gritty details about biochemistry, but then they would also try to tie it back to what was happening. What these bits of clockwork in the cell were trying to ultimately do for the organism in the Incentral environment. And that's what was very impressive to me. And so this is why I think this is an awesome organization. And really I want to mention this briefly. We're right across the street from the Salk Institute for Biological Science. I checked their web page the other day. And they write there on their front page the tout there, the fact that they're using cellular and molecular biology to get some of the problems that we talk about. Alzheimer's, top two diabetes, top one diabetes, Parkinson's disease. And I don't know. It's a beautiful location. That's what their campus looks like right across the street from us, looking out of the Pacific Ocean. It's beautiful. I don't know. But I would say that we, people were pioneers like Terry Walls and Dale Bredesen, what they've done for their pathologies, you could make the argument that they've, in a few brief years, I've been able to rock it past what the Salk Institute has been able to do, really. And actually getting cures are effective treatments for reversing a lot of these pathologies. So that is pretty much it. I would like to acknowledge briefly, first of all, everybody I know here at this conference, you're all my good friends and I've, we all experienced the magic when we come here and talking to our fellow tribespeople. I want to thank especially Aaron Blaisdell, Tess Fowler and Michael Rose for direct support in being able to come here. And also my professor, my advisor, David Sloan Wilson, my doctoral advisor at Bigampton, he is all about Tim Bergen for questions. And he has probably single-handedly introduced these concepts to more young minds than almost anybody out there now. And I would like to thank him especially. And also useful conversations I've had over the past year with Ken Ford from the IHMC in Florida. So I am about five minutes ahead of time. So that'll give us plenty of time for questions if anybody has anything. So please folks, I do come up and ask some questions. I have a few questions myself, but we'll save them if you guys have some. Thank you. Wonderful paper. I really appreciate that kind of theoretical underpinning work. I wonder, given the examples that you raised about bird song, which I find absolutely intriguing as well, whether you have any thoughts about sexual selection and whether there's a place for sexual selection as part of the theoretical underpinnings that we can use in the ancestral health movement.  Yeah. Yeah. Like evolution by natural versus sexual selection. Yeah. We'll look at the ultimate level there on the graph. You know, the survival value, I think it would, it would sort of be, it would be subsumed under under there. Evolution is talking about how really survival is not the ultimate goal of evolution, but it's ultimately reproduction. So survival is only valuable insofar as it's tributary to reproduction. So really I would, what do you think that the sexual selection would, which should fall under under that it would be like a special case of survival. Right. Survival and reproduction. Yeah. I guess I'm thinking about whether, whether there couldn't be sort of an enhanced sense of what we have of ancestral health if we start thinking more about cultural exuberance and the kind of aspects of human life ways across long time and across cultures that really are a product maybe of the selection, the sexual selection rather than the more adaptive levels. If that makes sense. Yeah, I think so. I'd like to talk to you more about that and get some ideas. Hey, man. Are you aware of any applications of Tim Bergen's ideas or models to sort of like predictive, like if you change the ecology in some system, how will the organism adapt? I think, are you saying like, has anyone ever like predicted what the approximate level effects would be based on changes at the ultimate level? Is that one? I think about that a lot actually. And I'm struggling to find examples that really should be the big challenge for us. Because God knows there's money and time going into big research. Rivers of money are flowing into the biomedical establishment to study the things at the approximate level. I think really the challenge for us would be to say, we predict these effects will happen at the approximate scale based on tweaking some of these ultimate level more abstract forces at play. I think people are starting to do that basically with like for instance, like even a simple paleo diet, like randomized clinical trial. I mean, I would predict for instance, and I think people here have probably done some of those studies, like I would predict that inflammatory markers would go down. Oftentimes the cholesterol, ACL, LDL, ratio will flip, right? These things have, you know, we could predict that that would happen. Is that what you're asking kind of? Yeah, but to generalize that, you know, you have lots of data on like the bird song and everything. Can you like predict how the bird song would change based on how the ecosystem changes, for example? Yeah, I'll have to think about that in those terms. One way I have thought about, one person that I've seen it do it, I've seen do that in a medically relevant context is Paul Ewald, one of the co-founders of Darwinian Medicine. He talks about how change in the environment in terms of how easily an evolving pathogen can get transmitted to new host is going to change how it acts on the individual host, how aggressive or virulent that it is based on changes at the ultimate level. So I think that that would be, yeah. Hi, Andrew. Hey, Brett. So it struck me when you showed the picture of all the metabolic pathways that somebody had done the work of putting it all in one place. I wonder if you know if anyone, yeah, that one, has done something like enumerated, made an attempt at enumerating all of the evolutionary mismatches currently we're experiencing in modern life. And then you could almost see creating a checklist and saying, okay, well, I'm definitely mismatched here. I'm letting artificial light hit my eyeballs at midnight or something like that. I'm not eating right. I'm not paying attention to my circadian rhythms.  Maybe Dan Parties tried to do something, or maybe there's some practitioners who try to give people a heuristic. But it could be valuable. Yeah, wouldn't that be great though, for real? If we can have, like, the arrows going through this, like, you know, here's what's changing at this level, at this stage, at this stage, at this step, exactly what's happening, you know, at each one. That's what would be, that's where I see the future of ancestral health is the merging of, like, people really doing, living up to Tim Bergen's dream of having complete four question answers to all these phenomena, you know. Right, and then personally we all could look at this checklist and probably we would learn some areas that were out of whack and didn't even know that that was happening kind of thing. Oh, yeah. I mean, none of us are experts. Very few people can master all four things.  Just, you know, it's easy to get, it's hard to see all four. Yeah, okay. You know, it's the same time. But wait, I'll say this briefly. One advantage of having that Tim Bergen, the ultimate evolutionary perspective is it would allow you to pick out which particular proximate level mechanisms are. The sea turtle conservancy, the conservation biologists there were able to say, let's not look, we don't have to look at every step in this process. We can predict, ah, I bet it's the damn blue, not just the light, nocturnal lighting coming from the beach houses, but it's perhaps just the blue portion of the spectrum.  We can biohack that part. So that's the advantage, really, is that it's not, it helps us find a way out of the wilderness of all these proximate levels, cellular and molecular biology questions, hopefully. Thank you. It points the direction. It gives us like a compass. Yeah, I taught. Great talk, and my point, my question really follows on what you just said about using the two levels to work together. In fact, I think some of the best talks and papers use an interaction, you know, between those two levels. And we've even seen here in this conference, for example, I think Ron Rosdale's talk on MTOR was looking at it both at a mechanistic proximate level and an evolutionary level, and I think Amber's talk on uric acid was the same thing. This very, very specific metabolic product, she was looking at it in terms of impact and how migratory birds, you know, might evolve. So I think the best talks actually incorporate both and the proximate feeds to the ultimate and the ultimate feeds to the proximate. Yeah, I hope one day that I'm as good as they are, and I know as much about the proximate level stuff as I do. I tend to do better. I understand arguments from evolutionary theory more. I'm more curious about that. But I know enough of the proximate level to know that the people who can combine those two, the ultimate and proximate, are really doing the Lord's work there. So, thank you, Evan. Thanks, Brett. That was amazing. Could you put that slide back up of proximate and ultimate? That was so, yeah. In my field, and Mike Mu and Scott Solomon's dentists that are here and physicians. How many physicians are here? A couple. Good. One of the problems that we have, and I think I really see a solution, a help coming from you, in that Randy Nessie, who is the physician who developed the whole concept of, with George C. Williams, an evolutionary biologist of evolutionary medicine, the first conference that he was speaking at to a medical group was, he got up there and introduced the whole theory. And then as he's leaving the podium, he's passing Stephen J. Gould, who was invited as an evolutionary biologist to talk. And Gould said, nice talk, Randy, but they didn't understand a goddamn word of it. And it's really true. Everybody here, well, I'm so looking forward to talking to people this afternoon because you guys get it. I don't have to spend the first part of my lecture, and that's what Nessie learned. He has to spend almost half a lecture laying down the basics for medical students and physicians and dentists. Are you ever asked to speak at medical conferences or dental conferences? Because what you have there, what is the proximate cause of a disease? Bacteria entering, fever entering the blood, but what's the fever mechanism ultimate? You will be so valuable to medicine and dentistry, Brett. And I'm just wondering, is that something that interests you at all, or have you been asked yet to do this? No, I'm flattered. You would say that. Hopefully, if and when I make better progress by getting my PhD, you know, toward the completion stages, hopefully that will start to happen. You mentioned, did you mention fever?  I would like to just mention that. Look at that. Fever would be something that would be studied maybe at the proximate scale. They know that, oh, this gene turns on and it creates this signaling pathway that then upregulates some gadget in the body. So let's just give for centuries now. People, doctors have said, okay, well, my patient's suffering, he or she feels bad, they're running a fever, let's do something to reduce that fever. Well, they never, literally never ask, well, maybe there's a survival value. Maybe the fever is there to do something. Yes, it makes the patient hurt, but there are some things more important in life than to be free of pain at every given second, like getting over an infectious pathogen.  The fever is an adaptation. It's an involved response to the pathogen. But even that concept is not well-known even among many medical doctors. Yeah, fevers make us miserable, but it makes life impossible for the pathogen. Yeah, so that's the explanation. You know, Randy Nessie has talked a lot about medical, I mean, he's just trying to get some of these basic ideas introduced into medical school because it's not, because they had to study so much detail in cellular and molecular biology. It's hard for them to even see the value of the evolution approach, right? So I think the Timbergen framework is saying and either or it's like this will allow you to understand better what's going on at the approximate levels and why those approximate level things are happening in the first place. What's up, Dan? What's up, Brett? I want to say congratulations on doing an excellent talk today and to say that it's been fun to watch your journey and you serve as a really excellent champion to the ideals that holds all of this together. Thank you. That's very, very flattering coming from you there, my friend. Thank you. And to your point, I just wanted to make a couple of comments, but I think one thing that we see when we don't have a more complete perspective of all the factors that are affecting our health is that we will over-index on one of them, like exercise. So if you don't achieve all of the health that you'd like, well, then I better just exercise more, which could lead to a different type of mismatch. So having a checkbox is an excellent idea and undoubtedly we will discover more ways in which we are increasingly accelerating our mismatch in time. 15, 20 years ago, we didn't know much about how light affects circadian rhythms and all the ways that affects the body and same with the microbiome. And so now those are being included as a part of health models and what will we know in 10 or 15 years from now? But I think the more that we can try to establish a more evolutionarily natural pattern across every way that we can conceive, we're going to get better results than trying to squeeze blood out of an orange through one of those tools, if you will. So good point on that. I wanted to sort of reiterate it and agree. And I did have another point that I'm forgetting, so I'll have to share it with you afterwards. Hey, can I ask you a quick question? Sure. You just completed your PhD in a pretty hardcore science. Do you think for you, understanding, having at least one eye toward the ultimate level, the evolutionary kind of framework, has it helped you be able to sort through some of the tedium that you see in a lot of scientific studies? Would you say it's been useful in helping you kind of develop a framework to make sense of it all a little bit better? Yeah, outside of it, outside of my specific field, it's harder for sleep. I mean, more so with circadian biology, for sure. Circadian biology? But the way that I... This was the other comment that I was going to make, that health, of course, is very confusing and rightfully so, but it seems incredibly confusing where the more you learn, if those are all individual pieces that are not tied together in any way, then it feels like every time you learn something else of value, it's like, gosh, that's one more thing that I'm going to forget. But if all of those points feed up to a North Star, which is to live more naturally, then every time you learn something new, it reinforces the idea versus just add complexity to this thing that overall feels overwhelming. So I think having that perspective, I've always liked the idea of mashing up sort of modern-day science, the proximate and the ultimate, but I couldn't agree more. You could absolutely get lost in the proximate and I think we're going to develop AI systems and stuff to sort of establish truths, get more evidence for it, and I think we should, but having that ultimate view can really make your efficient, your research efforts more efficient. Yeah. I hope so. I think so. Yeah. It should be a part of every research project. Just look back in history and say, what's that? It should be a part of every paper. It should be part of every paper. Right on. Thanks, Brett. We're just about at 41 minutes, so... Yeah, I was going to add, I completely agree, so I just fairly recently graduated from medical school and feel lucky to be in this community where you can have a different lens and to blend the ultimate and proximate causes. And I think we get so bogged down in the proximate level that there's like no space for even thinking about things evolutionarily. And you could eliminate some of these proximate lectures that we would have and just insert one little lecture with some ultimate explanation. Read their book and you start to look at things differently. You can have a completely different lens. And I think that would be a wonderful area to start to partner up and having individuals like yourself and us in the medical profession to try to get into these schools and just get one lecture to give people a completely different conceptual framework to look at systems. And so I definitely, I completely agree. We got to figure out maybe that something we champion in this society is getting into those areas because I think it could do a lot of good when you get to folks at that level and start thinking about things differently. And as you were saying too, it's not about our way versus their way. It's about really blending it and seeing how you can look at things. Yeah. It's about having a complete framework to explain something. Yeah. Yeah. Hi, Stephanie. Hi. I just wanted to say that, thank you. Awesome. Everything. And to this last train of thought that everybody's asking, Josh Turknitz talk a little later on is how to win at Angry Birds. And I think he also like, he's dividing it into like source level and game level stuff and has a nice diagram of a bunch of things that could go on a checklist like this. So I would recommend like for everybody that wants to keep following on that same track. I think his talk would be a really of interest along the same thought process that's later this afternoon. Yeah. How to win at Angry Birds. How to win at Angry Birds. Okay. It's funny and fun and it's great. And it covers this like looking at, he calls I think what would be proximate here. He calls source level and ultimate he calls game level and like how to look at these things in a way that's really understandable because it's like about Angry Birds. Yeah. Yeah. We're talking about sort of a concrete versus abstract distinction too. So I'm still thinking about all that. I guess we're out of time. Thank you all for coming and being here. Thank you.


All right, so the rest of the talks in this session are about healthcare data. But this is specifically about a healthcare analysis tool and how to use it for things that are not involved with healthcare. So hopefully this will be interesting and useful to some of you. It's actually been one of the biggest projects I did last year at my work. We're gonna talk a little bit about what rate sensor data is and then about what a survival function is and how to estimate it. I have a couple of real world examples I'll show you but they're kind of boring industry paying money customer examples. And then we'll take a little detour into the sequel to actually compute these curves. So rate sensor data is on a left to right timeline. Anytime you have data where at some point you stop being able to observe it and you don't know how far it goes on from there. So if we wanted to, for example, know the average length of the lines in this figure, we would know that it was more than what we can see because we know some of them go on longer than what is visible here. But we don't know exactly how much further they do go. And so it's a little hard to answer some questions about like how long these things go and how information like that. And not all rate sensor data is all beautifully lined up at the start of your experiment. Some of it is from real world data and so it's things like when did the customer start paying you? Or when did somebody graduate from their MLIS? And so there's all this information about that just, it's based on how long you've seen it for and you can be censored at any time because they drop out of the study or because you hit the censoring time where there's no longer, it's now today and so we don't know if people have hit the event that we're interested in. So how do you find a midpoint when so many points are unknown? Well, they're not unknown. We do have some data about them. So there is a method, we can try and do this. But I'm actually also gonna try and say that maybe this is not the best question. A lot of the time I get questions like how long does it take someone to use such and such a feature? How long does it take someone to send an invite? And they really wanna know what happens in the first few days or in the first little while of us getting something. So it's just as good or better to answer how many people send one during the first day, how what proportion of people do something during the first seven days is just as useful or more useful than what's the average time? The average time could be much longer but we can still use survival analysis to get that average time and some other information about that process. We're gonna look at survival functions and they are these downwards sloping curves that have time on the x-axis and the proportion that have not yet hit the events on the y-axis. The event is canonically death because of survival analysis. So it's often called the proportion surviving and that's why it's called the survivor function. We're gonna estimate them with Kaplan-Meier curves and they're a non-parametric estimator that will approach the true survivor function as we add more data and it uses all the data available for every time point. So it treats the data that is like this as data that is like this by saying I've seen it for the first few days so I can count it for day one regardless of when day one happened in the time. Then we can actually estimate the actual estimator that we have is actually pretty simple and it's a stair set function over each period of time and we take the product of one minus the number of observations that saw the event at time t over the number of observations we know about at time t. And as the centering goes on you're gonna have more and more observations drop out of that bottom number. You're gonna have, you're just gonna not know about people for some of my paying customers I know about for four years or three weeks or whatever but as I get further out and I start looking at four years I have fewer and fewer customers that I know about for that long and so there's that number in the denominator gets smaller and smaller. And one other wrinkle of the survival function itself is that this estimator of it will often not go all the way to zero because you would have to have every single you would have to have one minus one in the product and that would mean that every single one of the observations that you knew about at a certain time saw the event but we know we have censored data so that's not likely to happen. But if you do do that and you have your estimator it's really easy to find the medium and it's not the mean that people are actually asking for but the medium is probably close enough for what people really want. And so you can just find out what's the proportion that survive. You wanna find out when 50% of the proportion have met the event and so that's just something you can find on the curve and go down to the timeline. But that's not all you get this entire curve. And so this is a real data set from my real work where we want to have time that a customer stays a subscribing customer and is paying us. And so I can answer questions about like what's the probability that somebody will stay for the first seven days after they sign up? Or what's the proportion that stayed for an entire year? And this is a lot more rich of a data set than just what's the average. But that's not all. You can look at different groups of data and compare their curves on the same chart and get a feel for which ones are more likely to hit that event sooner or later. And this is our favorite example because it gave us some really good business objectives to change things around. When we bill people annually, they're more likely to drop out in the first 30 days than when we bill them monthly but after the first 30 days, they're more likely to stick around for one year than monthly customers are to stick around for just two months. So we really want people to stick around and keep paying us. So this incentivizes us to give discounts for annual subscriptions and try and sell them more for people. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about how to do this in SQL. And you probably don't need to do this in SQL for what you're doing. You might. It's cool. But you can definitely do this in R or Python and then it's a lot simpler. It's a little more straightforward. But I work in dashboard land and I need to show this data, update it periodically with all the real data behind it. And I don't wanna have to do some kind of crazy job that runs Python every night and uploads a file with the image in it every time. So I just have, I just do it in SQL and I'm able to actually get that data right away in the dashboard for people to see it. So there's a couple of tricks I'm gonna play. I'm gonna generate a list of numbers. I'm gonna sum the results of the case statement and then my most mathematical trick here, believe me on this one, we might need to look it up but the log of a product is equal to the sum of the logs. So we can rewrite that product function so that we take the log of it, we change that to the sum of the logs and we take the exponential of the whole thing to get it back out into the right frame. And that gives us, that can let us use tools that are all built into SQL. The SQL does not know this notion of taking a product over many rows. It's pretty cool with taking a sum over many rows. So all you have to do, all you have to have on your main table is the event time and the time scene. And the event time is gonna be null for all those censored observations. You're gonna have a lot of those censored observations where you just don't, they don't ever hit the event. They might hit eventually later but you don't have that data yet. But you always know how long you've seen them for, whether that's one week or four years or whatever it is. And so you just get that into the same frame and put it all together. And then as like a framework for our query, for our next part, we're gonna generate a list of the time periods that we want to go over. And we're gonna do this with row number. So we're gonna create this table called day shift by selecting the row number of, over anything from a big table and limiting to 3000. So I only want 3000 days. So this is gonna give me a list of one through 3000. And I can play with that and you just use it as a set of numbers. I apologize for there being a slide that is 100% SQL, but I promise you, this is just calculating one minus DI over MI for each of those time periods. But let's look at it. So for each of those time periods, so we're from day shift, our list of one through 3000. I get the day number, I get one minus. I take the sum of the time when they, remember this is the numerator is the people who've actually seen the event at that time. So we've seen them for that amount of time and the event time is not null. And then the denominator is how many we joined from our table that has our data in it. And so that's all the ones that we've seen where the time scene is greater than or equal to this time number. So now I've got a table that's just one comma one minus DI over NI. And I wanna pull it together and get that product function. So I get to use a summation as a window function. So I take the exponential of the sum of the log of the inside, the one minus DI over NI. And I take it over unbounded proceeding in current row. So that takes all of the previous rows and then adds them up to the current row. So that for every TI you have T1 by itself and then T1 minus T2 and then T1 minus T2 minus T3 and so on. And then this gives you a table that just has the date number and then the proportion that survive for each time. But I told you you could have more than one curve and you can have them in your SQL without having to compute each of these separately. You just need some categorical variable and to include that in your original data set. And then when you calculate the DI over NI for each of the days, you also group by your categorical variable. So I would have a Danum comma billing period here and I would group by Danum comma billing period. And then when I get to the end, I just tell it to partition by billing period so that it calculates these separately for the two different billing periods or however many cases that you have in your thing. And then you still have your unbounded proceeding in current row to get your multiplication for all the past values of TI. And then you'll get something like this where you have the date number and then also the different values for the billing period or whatever your categorical variable is. So kind of analysis is pretty cool. You can use it, it can help you out. You can find the average times in an event, but that's not all. You can actually understand the process and get some data about like how long different portions of time last and perhaps most excitingly, you can compare different groups and make business decisions based on which of them are more likely to hit those events and how frequently. So thanks for listening to me. You can find me on the survival analysis channel on the csv.com slack. All right, so I'll still be in the Q and A channel like everybody else. I'm Ansid on Twitter and I'm Ansid at Weirder Irifang, Massedon. Awesome, thank you so much, Melissa. I'm gonna clap. My cat is determined to be part of this. Hello kitty. It's fine. Okay. We have a question, if you don't mind answering, if that's okay. Yeah. How much slash what kind of dialogue did it take to switch to this method versus using average slash rates? Oh, what a good question. It was actually an idea proposed by my CEO. We had plenty of buy-in right away. They had heard about survival functions and knew that they could have something that could give them that comparison over groups and that was really what they were going for. But they still asked me questions in that midpoint way and I just don't answer them. I just answer them for their first seven days or the first day or something. Cool, we still have a bit of time. So if anyone has any other questions, I'm sure Melissa will gladly try to answer it as much as she can. Oh, she totally will answer it. I think my best. Let me just trim my camera back on. Okay, not alone now. If everyone's happy, Melissa will be around. She does have a Slack channel on CSBConf which hopefully she'll visit after the conference as well. And oh, that's a good question. Any suggestions for background reading? Just slide to the SQL arms and Odo. The book I've been using, I hope this is not flipped for you, is Survival Analysis by Kleinman and Klein. And this is just chapter one. There's so much more. There's all these statistical tests to tell you whether those curves are different or ways to put covariates in there and add them into the thing. Like there's so much more to survival analysis. That's just like the very piniest bit you could do to be able to do something useful. Great, well, all these great questions. Someone has asked, can you tell us a little more about your own background? I'm a data analyst slash data engineer. I've been doing this for a long time. I work at a startup and I'm just the one data person there. So I do all of the product analytics and financial analytics and things like that. But I'm very interested in government and open data and things like that. And so I'm always really happy to be here at CSB Count. Amazing. And another question is how, sorry, have you used Survival Analysis for forecasting? I have not. I think that that would be interesting. And this has me thinking of looking at outcomes for program evaluations. Any warnings for people trying to apply it? I think you should totally try it. And that would be an easy thing to have separate curves for. So different programs and what are the outcomes and when did people reach them? And how do people reach them from certain programs faster than others? Cool. Well then, if there are no other questions, which I feel like when I said, does anyone have questions, everyone came out? But a big thank you from all of us at CSB Count because Mel, you've been one of our biggest supporters for many years now. So thank you. You keep accepting my talks, I keep coming. And they're always so much fun, so. Thanks so much. Thanks so much. Bye.


Again, my name is Jeff Belliston as this slide says I'm the Assistant University Librarian for Scholarly Communication Assessment and Personnel at Bremen Young University and I'm joined by my colleague Elizabeth Smart who is our Scholarly Communications Librarian. This is just a brief outline of our presentation. I'm going to do a little in setting the overall context, talk about current efforts in the Herald Navy Library at BYU. Elizabeth will touch on the results of a recent survey she and the colleague conducted and then we'll both talk a little about opportunities for the future and certainly hope to leave some time for questions at the end. Last week, some of you may have participated in the EDUCOS 2011 conference that took place in Philadelphia. I participated in the virtual conference and one of the sessions I attended was given by Malcolm Reed who is the Executive Secretary of the Joint Information Systems Committee in the UK and this is a slide directly from his presentation. Reed says many effective examples of openness in the Scholarly and Academic Environment listed four. Open Access, Open Data, Open Source and OER and several others. Another slide of his presentation had several others listed. He said all of these have been pursued by enthusiasts either individual enthusiasts or a group of faculty perhaps in a discipline who've been enthusiastic about one or the others of these things but institutions as a whole have rarely recognized the value, the strategic value of openness in all of these various forms speaking very frankly librarians were enthusiastic, became very enthusiastic about open access that particular part of the openness agenda more than a decade ago and I'm grateful to say that I feel like librarianship is moving more in this strategic direction of recognizing the value of openness in all of its manifestations. I hope that you sense that in this presentation. You'll see I'm actually going to go from the bottom. Forces for change in the library arena relative to openness have included the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition or SPARC, the Association of College and Research Libraries which is a division of the American Library Association and the Association of Research Libraries SPARC's entire strategic agenda is built around openness and particularly open access and both for ACRL and ARL a key plank of their strategic plans for the next several years is centered around the scholarly publishing arena and what we can do to do that. Libraries recognized there are a lot of imbalances in the scholarly publishing arena and we need to do something to correct those imbalances. Financially that imbalance had its worst manifestation in what was called the Serial Crisis largely or hugely increasing prices and profits for commercial publishers particularly in STEM fields as opposed to stable at best and shrinking library budgets at worst which meant that libraries could acquire less and less of the scholarly resources that their faculties and students needed in the intellectual property rights signing over all of the rights to the publishers and leaving nothing in the hands of the scholars who are actually doing the research to the point that in some cases they were denied the right to use the materials that they had authored in their own classrooms for their own students and the quality mechanism spoken of here at least in the developed world there hasn't been, we heard today, India would like to open 50,000 universities there's no such movement in the United States or any other developed country that i'm aware of so the stable of potential peer reviewers or the stable was the wrong word i was like to say the number of potential peer reviewers for scholarly materials has been relatively stable while the number of journals and things to be reviewed has been going up. Peer review if you if you listen to Clifford Lynch at some of the presentation that he's made peer review is a broken system we have we work with an editor on our campus it takes four invitations to get a single peer reviewer for every article in the journal that he edits so what are we doing in the Harold Beebe library where Elizabeth and I were in the openness arena we sponsor an open digital an open access digital repository called scholars archive and you see some of the varieties of material we have there electronic theses and dissertations research papers whether that is something that is pre peer review or post peer review or final publication formatted as it would be for the journal all of those varieties are there poster sessions presentations made at conferences we have two fairly interesting we're calling them research collections images from our historical clothing collection theater and media arts professor who curates this collection imaged all of those materials and we're finding good uptake from costume designers people who are planning productions and and wanting to know what what things look like we also are in conjunction with the curator of the Stanley L. Welsh Herbarian in our life science museum they've begun digitizing the plant specimens that they have there and if we got all of them digitized we have close to half a million images it's a very larger barrier we're also using public knowledge projects open journal system software in our scholarly periodical center and are currently hosting 12 titles either produced at BYU or edited by a member of the faculty at BYU so it doesn't have to be a BYU publication for us to support that open access we are have been digitizing for a number of years materials from our special collections and they are widely all of them openly available on the web one of the most interesting things we've done in the last year is begun partnering with the internet archive we have what's called an internet archive scanner actually we have three of them in the library and we are digitizing materials from our collection so far only those things that are in the public domain but scanning as of yesterday 9,440 complete books and putting them up on archive.org not to be confused with the other archive which is the ARXIV.org and that's the the high-energy physics and repository for those kinds of materials I'll turn the time over to Elizabeth now to talk about what's next in her survey so within this framework of multiple repositories for multiple formats and then we also have quite a solid commitment of resources we have three full-time employees who work in scholarly communication and then some additional student employees within this framework we thought we questioned where to make our next improvements Jeff mentioned that we well we adopted open journal system I think it was probably 18 months ago or two years ago now and that was a significant improvement for our readers in terms of in terms of function and then also for our faculty as a great faculty service in terms of the editorial component we thought what's the next big upgrade that we could make from the perspective of teaching faculty how could we focus our efforts that would improve scholarly communication in an open way and so we opted to ask broadly and we did this through a survey of 2300 faculty on campus we we had about 43 questions we had 510 responses from all colleges across campus the respondents were pretty much evenly divided between assistant associate and full professor but we had some additional adjunct faculty respond as well as some folks from department and college administration the topics that we covered in the survey were really publishing support you can see those they're open access repositories data management digital reformatting and open access journal hosting all focus my comments today on the publishing support open access repositories and open open access journal hosting so we began the survey with a series of pretty straightforward questions about publishing when asked 60 percent of respondents said they were aware of open access journals in their field you can see those numbers there roughly half are publishing or interested in publishing in open access journals about 53 percent are aware of their rights to their published work about 46 percent are aware that some publishers accept alternative publishing agreements but only nine percent have submitted one of these alternative publishing agreements we received several comments in this in this section with and I go back with the people expressing concern about open access outnumbering the positive comments about two to one but continuing with questions about author rights 67 percent are interested in learning more about this topic but only 29 percent have used our principal campus resource that's the BYU copyright and licensing office website to to learn more 22 percent are familiar with creative commons licenses but just over seven percent have ever used creative commons license and we had several comments requesting additional information about about about open access about creative commons licenses and that's something that we plan to add to our scholarly communication website sort of in a frequently asked question section or in a myths kind of dispelling myths section we also asked about potential content for and features of open access repositories when asked what types of items faculty would like to add in an open repository they said that published articles conference presentations they really received the most interest and then video image collections and unpublished academic work kind of more in that second tier when asked what features were most important not surprisingly they said that web visibility was really the was their most important feature that they'd like in an open access repository with digital preservation coming in second place now we I think in the library see that easy access through a learning management system at BYU we have a new system called BYU learning suite that that's something that in the library we would see as a priority because it's a place where we can garner content as faculty put materials maybe their own materials or other open materials make that accessible to classes through the learning management system that we could potentially harvest that and put that into our digital repository we also asked about posting open access journals and when it comes to hosting journals online our faculty are primarily interested in making professional journals available with some support for student publications and department publications but when it comes to the nuts and bolts of taking a print journal and creating an online instance there seems to be some reluctance to to paying for these services you can see that only 30 people straight up said yes I'd be willing to pay for some of some of the services that would take to create that online instance and and for us it's not the challenge of digitizing it's the challenge of creating metadata that really makes these materials discoverable it's easy to make them accessible in an online environment but how do you make them discoverable and that's what costs us at least $9 an hour for a student several students working on that at a time in terms of future services when we ask respondents indicated a preference for a digital preservation repository for online book publishing and are becoming more interested in in print on demand so you can see there I've highlighted those three that the faculty are most interested in making it but again from the library perspective we're also interested in support for assigning persistent digital object identifiers and this really becomes a dual opportunity for us one opportunity is in providing that service and then the second opportunity is in educating faculty about why that service is important again in the spirit of making materials not just available online but discoverable so from this portion you've seen that some results of the survey from this portion of the survey where are our opportunities our priorities to impact open access and we talk a lot in academic libraries about information literacy it's one of our goals to make sure that students know how to find select and analyze information and I think with our faculty we have the same opportunity to just create a a greater literacy about open access and open content you can see from some of these comments that people really really don't know about some of these issues and that is a baseline opportunity for us and you can see from that third bullet someone who said I really don't care about my publishing rights journals can have them for all I care we might be able to provide an alternative perspective for this person just to maybe round out round out an idea of why his rights to his work are important and then also in terms of open repositories well open access isn't main but with this you can see this comment here I'm going to find my notes we have an opportunity to dispel skepticism about open access by supporting open repositories our goal is not to quit paying for journal subscriptions we had a few comments that were very very concerned that we were going to cancel all of our subscriptions but our goal is to provide as much access as possible to the scholarly and creative output of our faculty and our goal is to complement traditional publishing we can also correct the misunderstanding that open access and peer review are mutually exclusive the directory of open access journals lists thousands of journals that require quality peer review or editorial control and now I'm going to turn it back to Jeff just following up one thing that she said it is important for faculty to understand that if we don't bring some rationality as a scholarly publishing system we will end up not being able to pay for subscription journals we there simply isn't enough money out there for any library to do that so we need to to educate the faculty on that oh whoops the order advanced to my slide as you saw on one of elizabeth's slides faculty are concerned about the visibility of materials what they put into our open access digital repository and we're concerned about it as well we're using a system that we're not completely happy with and we are doing what we can to investigate how do we make it more visible ultimately we may end up having to change the platform we're on but if we have those digital object identifiers for these kinds of things we'll be able to do that and faculty's material will continue to be well will continue to be at least as visible and hopefully more visible we're participating right now bullet number two here in an institute sponsored by the association of research libraries and the digital library federation on e-research or e-science about data open data is one of those things there's Malcolm Reed in his presentation said if people if researchers don't have to create all of the data they gather some data but they can marry it with data that's been gathered by others there's more that can come out of that too frequently today data is sitting in an excel spreadsheet on somebody's external hard drive on their flash drive on five and a quarter inch floppies and it's being lost we want to and libraries have a place in this space to help preserve that they also saw on Elizabeth's slide they're interested in digital preservation they don't want to have to care for those things on their drive but wouldn't would like them not to be lost as well so we're investigating what role we can play and how the open access repository can bring that about one of the problems you already heard it mentioned in the keynote with mr. Shelton that standards are a very big part here if we don't have interoperable interoperability between repositories we don't have standards for description of these materials it will be hard to locate materials that might be irrelevant to your study and that gets right down to bullet number three that budgeting for metadata right now as elizabeth pointed out that's where our costs come in doing these kinds of things we don't have good technological tools yet to be able to take large volumes of material and make sense of them and accurately describe them using some standard control vocabulary or ontology it's a pretty much a human endeavor I think we will get there but in the meantime we have to budget in order to describe the materials that we're putting up I'm happy to say that BYU is rolling out this new learning management system we've been using a commercial product off the shelf for more than 10 years now and faculty have said this isn't working for us it's not doing the things we need it to do so our office of information technology has basically worked with the faculty to design and write a system modularized that will do the things that they want it to do we're building in the next phase or one of the next two phases enhancements for the service hosted by the library for audio and video streaming of materials that we already licensed so they can be used in the LMS also a copyright subsystem is being written into that so if faculty want to use material that is in copyright they can go out and identify and say no you don't have any right to put that up or yes you can one of the ways libraries have been helping and we have been trying very much to educate our faculty we license millions of dollars of resources in subscription databases one of the as as Jim Shelton said if we just say free and not better we're not doing what we need to do but free is still important a student shouldn't have to pay any extra for something that's already being paid for our library licenses 356 databases at the cost of millions of dollars most of those materials are in licenses that allow us to to put links in the learning management system that will direct the student back to those materials they should not have to be paid for again we've had faculty who pay the copyright clearance center to put it into a course pack when they don't need to do that and we're trying to get that education out say for that we're we're helping financially both the students and the faculty lowering the costs and paying only once for that kind of academic content we've had a meeting last week with the administration of our College of Family Home and Social Sciences and one of the associate deans was responding to a question what's the take up of textbooks he said there really isn't a lot of take up of e-text books in our college particularly in our upper division courses there's a take up of textbooks at all most of our faculty are tailoring their curriculum they're they're going out and getting articles that speak specifically to the topics they want to cover and that's all they're putting together learning management system our licenses put that all in the hands of the faculty and the students and they wouldn't have to pay we think that's a great thing to be doing um that concludes our presentation Elizabeth will come and join me and we're happy to take your questions yes hi um Joe Robertson from Jessica Sears um you've talked quite a bit about open access and the university academic world in supporting access to water effectively research materials and do you have any thoughts about the university's world in supporting educational content supporting thank you supporting academics in managing sharing teaching materials we when we when we speak with faculty across campus we don't distinguish between what kind of content we would welcome in our open repository the scholars archive we encourage them to put any kind of content that they'd like to in there including teaching materials it could be course materials it's a very lightly curated collection we really leave it up to the faculty to to let us know to give us the content so we encourage them to and so we don't put any restrictions on that we encourage them to put their research materials academic materials or their teaching materials and maybe that's something that we could hit a little harder in collaboration with the school of education the posters are synonymous with research and materials not teaching and learning materials like the OAI standard all these things have been about the institutional archiving of research and publications not teaching and learning materials so are you actually finding out people putting the teaching materials I wouldn't say any great uptake now right but we don't we don't predict that I would add a little bit to that from the administrative perspective I can tell you that some of our librarians are concerned about Elizabeth's stance and my stance that it is a lightly curated repository traditionally libraries have been in the business or librarians have been in the business of selecting from content not being able to buy everything but select good content that will support things and saying gee we're not going to have any any control mechanisms on what can or can't be put in this repository the administration's view has been faculty aren't going to want to put up things that don't have any value or that they consider to be dumb or they wouldn't want to be seen and that's where our lightly curated but she's absolutely right that we haven't seen a lot of uptake there there is no restriction on them doing putting in learning objects or any of the kinds of things that you're talking yes follow up comment under slightly related comment one one thing I said with that approach is you're assuming faculty will come to you and ask them to give you the aspect ask you to manage that so my my challenge would be what are you doing to go to faculty and say here's good practice and on a I did some survey work for this last year and I just tweeted a link to a survey that a colleague of mine is currently doing but we're on libraries so that's something we're going to add to that. We try to be as active as we can be in reaching out to faculty we we certainly work with our subject librarians our subject librarians are really the ones who have those the closest liaison relationships with faculty and departments and we routinely let our subject librarians know about the range of services that we offer we let faculty know that we are very welcome we we welcome them to send us our CDs but sorry their CDs their publication lists will review those publication lists and perhaps what we could add to that request is you know send us your teaching materials we can make that more overt a more overt request so we I don't think we think of it as a you know we've built it and certainly people will come we recognize that it's our responsibility to go out and let teaching faculty know the services that we have the repositories that we have and how they might benefit them and that's Jeff had mentioned in our new learning management system called Learning Suite we'd love to build more connections from that learning suite into the repository so that makes it so faculty just have to go one place and then by going that one place we could potentially grab some of that content so we're aware that that is our responsibility to to spread the message and we try to do that directly through direct contact from contact from the scholarly communications employees or especially working with subject librarians and then we also have an advisory group to the library with the representative from each college on campus and we make sure that they are aware of these resources too so we hope to catch in multiple trickle down ways that the interest of teaching faculty. We're also speaking to that as we did last week as we've met with the administration in the College of Family Home and Social Sciences it is one of those processes of continuous repetition and the the elevator speeches and those kinds of things sir. I am a teacher at a community college in California I teach English but I'm also the accreditation officer for the college and I find myself spending more time with accreditation than virtually anything else. I was kind of curious to know particularly with online issues and digital issues as well what kinds of challenges or problems you deal with from an accreditation standpoint meeting accreditation standards in these areas or is it from the library perspective? We have not I've only been in administration for a little less than two years now so I really haven't dealt with this we're coming we're at the beginning stages of our next accreditation process but I've never been informed that there were accreditation problems related to any of these kinds of things that we've been and speaking about. Any from any other institutions are you aware of issues related to that? I think sometimes from a faculty perspective it's a different mode of communication to students and there's a concern about equal access from the materials the quality of the materials presented those kinds of things privacy issues and so on and so forth. Haven't had any of that raised. We're out of time thank you very much for coming.


Is it a sacrifice to give up pain? You know, the belief in this world, the belief in bodies, the belief in perception, the twisted perception is death, literally. It's the belief in investment in death. And it's painful. It is painful to maintain belief in something that isn't true. And so the question then comes down to, is it a sacrifice to give up pain? Those who come to this world, so to speak, those who seek for idols, that seek for answers in this world are literally seeking for happiness and salvation where it cannot be found. And this is painful. So literally by giving up judgment, by giving up the ordering of thoughts and so on and so forth, this is the giving up of pain. Is it a sacrifice to give up pain? You know, to the deceived mind. Yes, only to the mind that doesn't recognize that it is pain. Yes, exactly. And the undoing is to recognize just what you said. Yes. That there's nothing here. And this goes immediately, runs right back into our discussion on pleasure and pain because they're like two sides of the coin. And you know, if you hold a song about love and marriage, you can't have one without the other. It applies to pleasure and pain. You cannot have one without the other. Many passages in the course about those who seek for pleasure cannot help but find pain as well. It's a disguise. I mean, the body's pleasure, you know, to the ego, this is good. It whispers to the mind, you know, that this is good. To itself it whispers this is death. They want passage in the course. The ego does not want the mind to see the trick of pursuing pleasure. Now, pleasure to the deceived mind is one of the greatest things going in the dream world. And this, if it's, this is a kingdom apart from the abstract spirit of God, this is perceived as being one of the best things going. I'll say. It's kind of like it's a cruel, wicked world that the deceived mind believes. And it's a doggy dog world and there's all this pain and sickness and suffering and everything. And at least, thank heavens, it would say we have pleasure. As a relief from all the others.  But what the ego does not let the mind see is that by investing in pleasure, obviously, pleasure is up the body and we're getting back into the senses and sensation and the pleasure reinforces the body as being real in the mind, in the awareness of the mind. And once again, you know, it comes back to those passages of you recognize the spirit or you perceive the flesh. Jesus clearly laying out that it's one or the other, that you can't have both. In the ultimate sense, there is no reconciliation between spirit and the time-space matter continuum.  I mean, knowledge and the happy dream, you know, don't have a meeting point. And the mind has to be trained to come to true perception or come to the real world or the happy dream so that God can take the final step. This is the steps that God requires of his children, metaphorically speaking, or the Holy Spirit requires. So when we get to this pleasure-pain thing, again, the Holy Spirit overlooks pleasure as he overlooks pain. People can see the Holy Spirit, you know, forgiving or overlooking the painful aspects of the world. But in passages in the Course, we also see where he just as easily overlooks a tiny throb of pain or a little worldly pleasure is the way it's stated in the Course. So once again, we get to the fact the Holy Spirit does not look to affect and the world of sensations, the feelings in the body and so forth, whether it be pleasurable, painful, or anything in between, are not in that domain. The Holy Spirit does not see the body as the deceived mind sees it at all. So it comes back full circle to that thing about giving up the values of the world and as you just said that a mind will perceive it as a sacrifice to give up the values of the world and see that the values of the world are painful, regardless of how they seem to be experienced. And one must see that pleasure and pain are two sides of one coin to be able to clearly come to that recognition. In any single instant, the Course tells us the attraction of guilt would be experienced as painful. But within the projected world of time and space, it gets kind of spread out on time so that then the mind can believe it's a person that has painful experiences and pleasurable experiences. It's kind of spread out, you know, the body is remembered or anticipated. One can think back even on, boy, these were painful experiences. That really hurt. And boy, those were pleasurable experiences. Wow, ooh la la, I remember when. But those are all miscreations, misthoughts. The mind is blank. The mind isn't thinking at all. The mind is covering over the whole instant. Yes, we're getting down to the core of things now. We're not dancing around the periphery anymore. We're down to the core, to the basics of it. And there's joy. I mean, that's the thing with it is there is immense relief, immense joy that comes when the mind gets clear on this, when the mind no longer buys the tricks of the ego. It literally listens to the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit's lessons are joyful. When the mind is learning what it thinks perceives as a painful lesson, the perception of it being painful is because there is a decision being made in the mind for the ego. One does not choose the Holy Spirit as an advisor and experience pain. That's ludicrous.  No pain, no gain. Pain, no gain and all these different things. You know, the deeper one goes, one can see how absurd that this is. This is not to say that pain can't act as a contrast, that the Holy Spirit does teach us through contrast. But it's the contrast of peace and joy and love, the experience of the feeling of connectedness with this painful experience, the contrast between the two that really, in a sense, propels the mind to want to move toward the joy and to make choices with the Holy Spirit to continue to feel that joy. We have to have something to rely on daily when all these things come up. And if we have these false self-concepts and we're working through all these lessons and forgiveness, we need something that we can feel close to. And the Course calls that something, the Holy Spirit. And it goes by many names and many traditions, the inner voice and intuition and the small still voice and just many, many names.  The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of joy. He is the call to return with which God blessed the minds of his separated sons. The Holy Spirit is the call to awaken and be glad. How can you wake children in a more kindly way than by a gentle voice that will not frighten them, but will merely remind them that the night is over and the light has come. The Holy Spirit sees the world as a teaching device for bringing you home. The Holy Spirit's teaching takes only one direction and has only one goal. His direction is freedom and his goal is God. Any direction that would lead you where the Holy Spirit leads you not goes nowhere. The opposite of joy is depression. When you're learning promotes depression instead of joy, you cannot be listening to God's joyous teacher and learning his lessons. The Holy Spirit is your guide in choosing. He is in the part of your mind that always speaks for the right choice because he speaks for God. The Holy Spirit's voice is as loud as your willingness to listen. It cannot be louder without violating your freedom of choice which the Holy Spirit seeks to restore, never to undermine. The Holy Spirit will direct you only so as to avoid pain. Surely no one would object to this goal if he recognized it. The problem is not whether what the Holy Spirit says is true but whether you want to listen to what he says. The voice of the Holy Spirit does not command because it is incapable of arrogance. It does not demand because it does not seek control. It does not overcome because it does not attack. It merely reminds. It is only because you think that you can run some little part or deal with certain aspects of your life alone that the guidance of the Holy Spirit is limited. Do you really believe you can plan for your safety and joy better than he can? You need merely cast your cares upon him because he caret for you. Be comforted and feel the Holy Spirit watching over you in love and perfect confidence in what he sees. Complexity is not of God. How could it be when all he knows is one? He knows of one creation, one reality, one truth, and but one Son. Nothing conflicts with oneness. How then could there be complexity in him? What is there to decide? For it is conflict that makes choice possible. The truth is simple. It is one without an opposite. And how could strife enter in its simple presence and bring complexity where oneness is? The truth makes no decisions for there is nothing to decide between. And only if there were could choosing be a necessary step in the advance toward oneness. What is everything leaves room for nothing else? Yet is this magnitude beyond the scope of this curriculum? Nor is it necessary we dwell on anything that cannot be immediately grasped. Okay, this would be a definite statement, as we were speaking on on the other side of the tape, of a statement that goes beyond all metaphors, that hints at a state that is beyond all metaphors, state of knowledge. And the Course of Miracles is basically a course that deals in the realm of the dream and deals in decision, making a decision for the Holy Spirit, making a decision for the right mind, and learning to look closely and distinguish between the alternatives for choice, presuming that there is a choice in the split mind. And although this is metaphorical, the mind that believes that it is separated from its creator must make choices. And the Course is simply a course to help one make a better choice where a mistaken choice was made before.


the Johnsonville famous racing sausages. It's the hot dog breaking out to an early lead with the Italian sausage in second. We've got the Polish in third, trailing the field, it's the chorizo and the bratwurst. The hot dog making it a race all by himself. He's way out in front. It's going to be the hot dog at the wire. Congratulations to the Johnsonville hot dog winner of the Johnsonville sausage race.