So first up on Big Talk from Small Libraries 2024 is Megan Kowalski. Good morning, Megan. Good morning. She is the Outreach and Reference Librarian at the University of the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C. And according to the info I have here, FTE of about 2,800 at the moment. And she's going to talk about library instruction teaching outside the box. Something that even though this is coming from a academic library, I think all of us are doing some sort of teaching in any type of library that we're in. So go ahead, Megan, take it away. All right. Well, everyone, thank you for having me today. I'm going to do teaching outside the box, going beyond traditional library instruction. I can be brief with my intro since we covered that. But my name is Megan Kowalski and I'm the Outreach and Reference Librarian at the University of the District, Columbia. Prior to taking this position, I was across town in D.C. at the Catholic University of America where I held positions in technical services. So I've had that whole scope of library experience. But most importantly, in my job at UDC, I do a lot of outreach. And along with my colleagues, and right now there are only four other librarians, although we're hiring one more. We also do a lot of instruction. And the University of the District of Columbia is the nation's only urban land grant institution. Our FTE currently is just under 3,000. This is a change. Historically, UDC was closer to 10,000. And that was because way before my time, UDC was three institutions that combined to make one University of the District of Columbia. And we are essentially D.C. State School, although D.C. is not a state. So that is something, you know, sometimes we get salty about, but we are one of the most affordable and the only public higher ed learning institution in the district. We have a highly non-traditional student population that encompasses a diverse array of learners, both in terms of demographics and backgrounds and experience. The majority of our students are commuters simply because we do not have on campus housing. We do contract out with some local apartment buildings, but we do not have dedicated student housing. And so most of our students are part-time. They're also working or have caregiving responsibilities on top of their coursework. So this informs a lot of what we do on a daily basis. So like many academic libraries, library and information literacy instruction at UDC is the one-shot model. If we're lucky, we are not required in any course, and faculty are the ones to invite us in. We have a lovely little form that can fill out on our website, or those who know us really well start to email us. Recently, we have started an opt-out embedded program in our general education writing sequence to sort of sneak into some classes we feel we should be in. But most of our sessions are one-shots. And in these one-shots, like most of you who do library instruction, we are called to provide library orientation, teach, quote, unquote, the databases, and focus on simple search strategies. And while our classes tend to be longer than the average college course, we generally get 60 to 70 minutes, sometimes even longer. Most of it is just the simple library orientation and teaching the databases. And library literature holds up this general look of the one-shot library instruction at most universities. And so in conjunction with two of my colleagues, one who I still currently work with, Catherine Meals, and one, Faith Rusk, who's since left for San Francisco State University, but we love her, so we're never letting her go. We are conducting a research project on how faculty design their student research assignments. And this came out of the, you know, quote, unquote, bad research assignment. Essentially, a faculty member wanted a student to use three peer-reviewed resources on an assignment where peer-reviewed resources were not actually, you know, the correct source type to get that type of information. And so we wanted to better understand how faculty design their research assignments, conceive of research as a process, and then teach research to their students. And we did this through a survey and then ultimately interviews with introductory writing course faculty. And our findings show that teaching faculty are overburdened because they feel like they have to teach the entirety of the writing and research process in a 16-week period. They also don't know what students are coming into their classroom with due to academic siloing. And they've also, you know, discussed how their students come in with a vast array of experience from no experience whatsoever to great, they know exactly what they're doing. And this is further complicated by the fact that neither writing nor research are truly linear processes and they're intertwined, so they have to be taught at the same time. And then while the faculty are doing too much, we at the same time as librarians are underutilized and our expertise in research is overlooked. And so why are we underutilized? Well, as I mentioned earlier, we're only called in really to teach two things and that is library orientation and database searching. And again, this is where the one shot is problematic because it neglects the complicated web that is the research process. And again, our findings are reinforced by long known anecdotes and existing research on what librarians are called to teach. And so this is a problem. The information landscape is vast and ever changing. Generative AI has only sped things up in this area. And so ultimately, search skills are the least we can do. I'm fond of telling my students that if you can search Amazon, you can search the library database. Those skills translate.  You're picking, you know, that's exactly the same as saying I want prime delivery. I want it in black and I want it this size. And so this is something we've always known that as our work in our research hasn't covered, you know, librarian expertise in the realm of information is drastically underutilized. At the same time, our faculty feel they are ill equipped to teach this. Most faculty are never trained to teach. And, you know, not only are they not trained to teach in general, but they're specifically not trained to teach research and thus they are overworked trying to learn as they go. And while the faculty we work with really do care and have expanded to become better teachers. This is a lot of burden on them when they already have a lot to deal with. Additionally, academic style of research is a great and necessary skill to have. Most students won't use it once they graduate or they won't have access to library materials, academic library materials once they graduate. And so as academic libraries and experts on information, we can pivot. And so we can broaden what we teach to reinforce lifelong learning and transferable skills. So this means going beyond one shots orientations and, you know, teaching the databases. And so there are several things that we can and should teach. And the first thing is the ACRL framework. And yes, you know, many of us have issues with this highly theoretical document, but it does have its uses. If you go down to it on a granular level and look at the dispositions and practices. Those are things that can be turned into modular skills based assignments that are both provided in the classroom through asynchronous learning materials or through things like webinars. And these concepts are transferable beyond academia. The one good thing about the framework is that it gets to the essential bedrock skills that any information literate person needs. It's not just for students. It's for everyone. Second, we can focus on career based skills. And this helps with the library's return on investment for the campus. We don't usually make the university money. Libraries are often, you know, where money goes and does not come back out of. But we can show our big impact here on things like student retention, graduation and employment rates. The library greatly benefits those on campus. And this is also a big motivator for students. Most students will not stay in academia. They want to focus on what will get them hired and the library can help them develop those skills. Additionally, you can help build the workforce for your community. Lots of students stay in the area and we should strive to help them create a strong and information literate community, which supports everyone, not just the university, but the localized area and the greater economy. Intertwined with this is also the idea of teaching lifelong learning skills. And this is where we can think of what do students need or what will they want after they leave. And this can vary from community to community and university to university. But essentially, how do we make information literate students? And how do we encourage students and faculty to have that forever curiosity where they just want to keep learning more about the world around them? And additionally, we want to think about things that have a personal connection. What are the students drawn to making things more relevant is something that is highly interesting. People want to work in things that they find interesting that they have a personal connection with. And you can get your students to see themselves as scholars and researchers and creators. You know, how many of us thought we were, you know, scholars with a capital S when we were undergrads? I'm going to guess not many. And that's simply because for so long, we've just been told, write a paper, turn it in, get it graded. But it goes beyond that back to that ACRL framework of scholarship as a conversation. And finding that personal connection can help students see themselves as scholars. Plus, the bonus of this is that teaching stuff in this area makes the library seem more likable and more approachable. And so how do we do it? On top of our traditional classroom instruction, which tends to focus on foundational skills in course tailored instruction, we can incorporate other methods. And first, the obvious one is webinars. These are fairly easy to implement. You just need something like a Zoom or a YouTube account to save videos and share recordings. It's also incredibly flexible.  You can make it work for you. You can also do short videos or long videos. At our library, we host monthly webinars, both for students and faculties. In fact, we have one later today. And these can vary in length from as short as 15 minutes to as long as an hour, depending on how the Q&A goes. These are also scalable and sustainable because you can reuse material. Each semester, I do provide a library orientation webinar that I simply update with new material that our students need to know each semester. But that just means tweaking slides that I already have. So this is an easy way to create content for your library in a sustainable manner. And finally, the biggest benefit of webinars is that they can be recorded and shared. Oftentimes, webinars that we provide to our students and faculty, the live attendance is not that high. But over time, the attendance on or the view rates on the videos on our YouTube page ticks up and up. Next, you can think of things like workshops. And I know a lot of us had to stop things during, you know, when COVID started, but now we can really get back into these. And this is a chance to provide some hands-on time. And the benefit of workshops is that they tend to be conversation-driven. Q&A just works better in person sometimes simply because you're not talking to black boxes on a screen. It also lets you hear from your community. People in a room will share things with you.  And it's also some people prefer in person. I remember when we had to take all of our services and put them online. So many of our students who we connected with in person, they said, I can't wait till you'll reopen again. It's just so much easier to talk to you in person. It's also a chance to provide a tactile experience. Some folks are tactile learners, so they benefit being able to get their hands into things, try things out, work side by side with you. And this is a chance to give them that sort of learning opportunity. You can also consider for both webinars, online instruction, and things like workshops, doing this through community and campus partnerships. And these can be held not only at your library or on your campus, but out in your greater community. And some places you can look at for these partnerships. If you're an academic library, the obvious one is, you know, the schools, departments and programs on campus. And essentially looking at what does that student need. If you're a public library, working with the other organizations that are within your local government. You know, if you have a parks and rec center or things like that, working with them. Other places are working with career services. Most universities have a career services department and most communities have some of workforce development area. And you can work with them to integrate library skills and information literacy instruction into these sort of programs. If you're also have any sort of EDI and diversity initiatives or organizations, those are great ones to work with. You can also look at student affinity groups. And these are not just at campus universities, but high schools will have these as well. And these vary greatly from school to school. And they tend to be highly niche, but smaller events. And these are sometimes a good chance to get more personal and provide that personal connection that a lot of students and others are looking at. You know, if you're a university, you can also work with a pack public library and vice versa. I am routinely reaching out to the DC public library to be like, Hey, how can we support one another? Another place to consider that I think is often overlooked in some instances is daycares. And a lot of these daycares also have parent groups. For example, I'm actually going to be doing a webinar on how to preserve children's art objects later this summer for my kiddos daycare. And that's something that can be recorded and shared again. And so local organizations love having that added thing. They can say, Hey, we're not going to charge you for this fun event. Come attend. And related to that, you can also look at local businesses. So, you know, literally who's outside your door? Who's outside your campus? What do they want? How can you work with them? And the bonus of working through these campus and community partnerships is that it helps place the library as a part of the community. And this can also particularly with academic libraries help with student admissions and retentions. Plus, you can also work with your alumni networks, which can increase donations. And if you're a public library, same thing, you can work with your friends groups. The more fully integrated you are into the community, the easier it is to get money because people know you and like you. And so when it comes to stepping outside the box, it doesn't hurt just to try something once. If it doesn't work, you can revise it and try again or try a new idea.  You know, not only is it good for libraries to try something and be like, Okay, that didn't work. Let's try again. It also models failure, particularly if you're an academic library be like failures. Okay, we grow from learning from our mistakes. And so in terms of ideas, I want to start with the slightly non traditional. These are pretty related to what we already do, but they go beyond library orientation and database searching. So many libraries might already do something like this. Those of us, particularly in smaller libraries where we only have, you know, those one shots. This is a way we can broaden our reach. And at UDC, we have a tendency to work with our faculty and be like, ask, okay, what do you want? And then be like, okay, we're going to slip in these other skills because more often they're not. They say something like, I want you to teach library orientation and the databases and really we get the assignment. We get the syllabus and we're like, yeah, we're going to slip these other fundamental skills in there as well. And so you can offer these in classroom instruction and workshops or specifically in webinars, simply because those are so scalable. And so the first thing you might want to think of is doing something along the lines of the library versus everything else. So what's in an academic library or a public library versus elsewhere? A lot of students don't know why an academic library is different. You know, oftentimes they're told by their professors, go to the library. They don't understand the why behind it. And this is a chance to showcase how information changes, you know, depending on where it is. I'm constantly telling students you come to the library for these kinds of resources and support helping you get access to these other kinds of resources. And holding a webinar on this can help people situate where information lives within the greater information landscape. And that rolls into the idea of, you know, the kind of information, you know, what's available, where to find it, and how to use it. This gets at the idea that different information does different things. And this is extremely useful for people, particularly after they leave academia. And you can also talk about things like research efficiency. We can all save time as research experts. We librarians have the tools and knowledge to share to help save students time and frustration. Our library recently did a top three tips for research efficiency webinar. It was short and sweet. We only had one or two people attend live that's already crossed over the 25 view count threshold. And I only posted that a few days ago to our YouTube page. So that one is we know is going to have a long tail because people are always looking for ways to be more efficient in what they do because we're incredibly busy. And sort of related to that is the idea of research management. What to do with all the things, you know, talking about folder and file organization, naming structure, citation managers. Lots of students don't know how, you know, to organize this information or the why behind, you know, why is this a good idea? I read a very interesting article a while back that talked about search has gotten so good that people are just used to naming their file, whatever, throwing everything in one folder and then searching for it when they need it. The problem is when it comes to research, things can get really, really mumbled, particularly if you don't have access to do something like a full text search. So this is highly transferable to work in life because the idea of organizing information is not just related to academic research, but in general how we just organize the information in our lives and in our work. Something that is a little bit academic that can be brought in out is the idea of teaching a course on how to read X. So how to read an academic article, how to read a business report, how to read a memo, lots of people learn this simply by doing it, but we can help jumpstart process. And in doing an instruction like this, we can go through each part, you know, of a piece of writing so we can take an academic article and say, this is what a methodology is. This is what a discussion is. These are what analysis is and go through each part and explain what it is, why it's there, what it is important for and what it does. And this can be a bit netta, but it helps our students and anyone who attends these programs become deeper critical thinkers. Some more slightly non-traditional ideas is the idea of personal archiving. We all have this stuff of life, but what the heck do we do with it? I did this as a webinar and this came out of a discussion I had with a faculty member. She was teaching a course on global archives and was originally just asking, I would like the library to come in to talk about the library, you know, the basic library orientation. And then another one of our faculty members come in and talk about the university archives. And when we started to talk, I was like, I think I'd like to come in and provide a workshop on personal archiving. And she thought that was a great idea and this has since been self-perpetuating. It has turned into our most watched webinar to date. I am doing it again. I am adapting this again for my daughter's daycare. But what's interesting about this is it gets people to think about how they are the archivists of their own life and the storyteller of their own life. And what does it mean to take the stuff, all the photos, all the files, the recipes, whatever it is that matters to them and make a story out of it and make a personal archive out of it and save it for the future. These are essential library skills that people don't think about and that can be transferred to life. And so this is something I've actually taken a lot of teaching on. And so if you're interested, if you go to the UDC library YouTube page, you can watch this webinar. And we will be offering it again this summer simply because it has become so popular. And as an HBCU, I'm fond of saying the new African American History Museum in downtown D.C. created its collection out of people's attics and basements simply because those families had saved those objects. And so making that personal connections to our students since we are an HBCU has really changed how people think about how they organize this material in their life. And then we can also talk about things like search resiliency, again, modeling failure and recovery. And this can also help with the anxiety around failure of research. People think it doesn't exist if I don't find it the first time when simply, oh, it just didn't work that time. Let's try something else. And so when we go through search resiliency, we can show how not everything works and we need to adapt what we're doing or search techniques to fit what we're looking for. And this, again, very transferable to life and business. And one that is growing in importance, sadly, is misinformation. And a program like this can be essential in saying not only what is misinformation, why it is, but also how to determine if something is a piece of misinformation. And sadly, this is going to be incredibly important this year, going into an election year. But this gets to the heart of what it needs to be information literate is figuring out, okay, what is true and verifiable and what is not. Tangled all right up in that is the idea of chat GPT and other generative AI. And I'm thinking here specifically of prompt engineering. Search is changing. And this is what's next. Focus on what it can be used for. You know, we know students are going to use chat GPT and things like that anyway. So we might as well focus on teaching them how to do it the quote unquote, right way. Essentially, the beneficial way that isn't plagiarism that isn't cheating, but does get to the heart of. These tools can be useful. So how can they be most useful to you? And then this rolls it right into the idea that research is messy. You know, what does the research process actually look like? It's not linear. People thinks that it is. So we can talk about how research is, you know, this big ball of to steal from Dr. who tiny, whiny research stuff. And we can help modular lies, you know, a complete and incredibly messy process. And so before I jump into getting to the non traditional outside of the box teaching things, I want to use this last point on research is messy to share this graphic I made and shared for fun. You know, how many of us follow the traditional methods of research these days? You know, we librarians highly trained in this. I'm going to guess not many. We know it's messy and we have our own tricks and methods and ways of organization teaching outside the box or moving beyond the traditional you walk in teach this this this and leave instruction. You can give a great behind the scenes. Look at how librarians work. We can demystify what we do, which is a good way to connect to folks more personally to research because research is an art. It's not a science. There's no, you know, one fully right answer most of the time. There's no one way to do it. Everyone develops their own methods. And so showing people to be like, okay, I'm teaching you this way, but here's this other skill you might want to try can be useful. And so now moving on to some more outside the box stuff. This is all tangentially related to what we do, but it seems like less of a focus. But in the end, it's all working with information and the skills that we as librarians have. So one of the big things you can do and I've done this before as an academic library simply holding a webinar on I need something to read. You know, how in the heck do we find new books? This one gets personal for people and they also have fun. You know, it's interesting to see what people share when they're like, oh, wait, I heard this. How do I find that? And so we can talk about how do you track down books? How do you find recommendations and things like that? We can also do something on photography skills. And this is a connection to visual literacy. We communicate these days through photos and how we present material through places like Instagram. And so this is useful for our students going into the workforce when they have to think literally about their image. And so this can be useful to discuss, you know, here's how you can use photography in your life. This is great for parents who think I want to take better photos of my kids. Another great one for life is creating your news diet. There's too much news these days. We can share how to make things digestible and manageable. We can discuss where to go, how to find balance, how to keep up and how to make things sustainable. Another one is how to start a newsletter. I'm specifically thinking of some stack. There are so many platforms out there. It doesn't matter. These days, students and faculty need a portfolio or a way to market their work. And some people just like to share. We can share the what, the why and the how of why you might want to compose a newsletter. Things like doing audience research, who would you talk to developing your content model and things like that. Big focus here is on writing and research of how to support getting something like this up and running. Somewhat related to this is the idea of public speaking. Again, communication is a key workforce skill, and we can cover the basics. Even things like how to organize a presentation or a speech, or how to do things like integrate a signal phrase when you're going to use research on a discussion. Again, that's core research skill. We're presenting it in an out of the box way. Sort of related to some of these is also the idea of developing a personal website. Again, people these days need a place to market themselves and academics, definitely need a place to store their CV and their articles and their links and all of that. And so getting at the core idea of how do you want to present information about yourself in a publicly accessible way. Tied into this is the idea of LinkedIn. This is the professional social media, but it is growing in importance. And this is a great opportunity for collaboration across departments or with other businesses. Because this is where you can talk about scholarship as a conversation. Once you are up and running on LinkedIn, sometimes LinkedIn themselves will be like, Hey, we think you're an expert in this area. Please share your expertise on this forum. And so again, you can discuss the idea that framework idea of scholarship as a conversation, but in a way that targets career based skills. And that's incredibly useful to people. Also incredibly useful is financial literacy. This is again an essential form of literacy. And it's a great opportunity for collaboration either with a local business or with various departments on a campus. One I really want to target this year is anything voting elections or politics based. You can talk about researching the candidates, how to register to vote, how to get involved in local politics, finding all of those groups for all of those ballot initiatives, things like that. We want an informed populace and we can provide the basic skills for students and others to not only figure out how they want to get involved, but then research the ideas and the candidates that are happening here. And we can also focus on things like finding local events. How many of us know what is going on locally or the news in our community? We can find how to share, you know, we can share how to find these things, you know, make lists of news websites and share those and things like that. And so this is just a few of the ideas for outside of the box. It's by no mean exhaustive because every library is different.  So there are a couple of ways you can get new ideas. And the first one is pull your staff. You know, what skills do they have that, you know, they might want to share. People have those hidden skills and it's always useful to just ask and be like, hey, what could you do a presentation on? And I would say don't limit this to just your teaching or reference librarians. You'd be surprised what people are excited to share. You can also look at what are vendors offering that you could recreate and tailor for your specific audience. Everyone has webinars these days and we can use those ideas to spark webinars or specific target communities. You can also look at your book and reading list, you know, this feels obvious, but I think it needs to be said. We can pull ideas from whatever we are reading, both for work and in our personal lives and come up with content ideas that way. You can also parse the ACRL framework itself. We made this a summer project at UDC for every week through a summer on Friday. We sat down with one frame and literally went line by line thinking of ideas and lessons to either do specific activities for, you know, one disposition or one bullet point or entire lessons, you know, wrapping that entire frame up. And my colleagues and I, we did write an article for this for College and Research Libraries News and so that is available online if you are interested in adapting that for your specific library. You can also think about what's happening in your community, you know, looking at the local news, whether it's, you know, highly local, hyper specific or thinking state level, national or even global and thinking, you know, what are people paying attention to? And what do they care about? I'm just thinking yesterday we had that AT&T cell service outage. Maybe we want to talk about things of how do you communicate without a cell phone? We've kind of forgotten how to do that. And that's something we can do as a library is teach the skills of, well, how do you get around this slightly, you know, information blackout? People care about what's happening around them. And so if you see what your community cares about, you can develop something around that. And finally, you can just ask your community. If you just ask, people will tell you there's always going to be someone to be like, I have a thought for that. And so it never hurts to ask. And so there are several bonus benefits to moving beyond traditional library instruction. First, it can improve or reinforce your brand. What do you want your community to think about you? We at the UDC library have become known as the helpful place simply because no matter what's happening on campus people know they can come to the library to get help. You know, we have people in person. We have people online. We pick up the phone. We answer emails. So people know we can connect them to what they need. And so I've leaned into that. And so we are constantly being like, how can we be more of the helpful place? And so you can use events like this to really lean into the brand image you have created for yourself. You can also strengthen your connections across the campus or across your community. And you can, you know, this can help remind people not only what you normally do, but what they can come to you for. Oftentimes we found with faculty when we're discussing how to develop content for a library instruction session. They're like, I didn't know you did that. It's simply, they just didn't know. And so the more we do this, the more people come to see us as these information experts who can do more than just teach the databases or library orientation. Doing something like this can also reaffirm the library as a place for support is literally a place people can go to and as helpful and friendly. Again, that brand image, but it's just reminding people this is what we are here for. This is what we can do. And for academic libraries, this can show that the library is an essential partner when it comes to student admissions, retention and alumni relations. And those three areas are where the money is. And since the library is often, again, we are not a place that makes money. This is a way to show how spending money at the library is well spent because the return on investment is so high. So I wanted to leave plenty of times for Q&A. So I want to again thank you for having me today. And I'm happy to answer any questions. I will have the slides for my presentation up on my website later this afternoon and that is listed here on the website and I'm happy to answer any questions you might have. Great. Thank you, Megan. All right here. Yes, and we will, there's a link there, we will link to your website for those slides for archive as well. That's what I was trying to say. Because we do provide when we are recording the day. Unless otherwise noted all of our sessions, our sessions will be posted to the Nebraska Library Commissions YouTube channel for the video for the archive. And then slides and presentations and handouts, it will vary depends on where they are. So in this case, we will link out to Megan's website and be able to find her slides there. So if anybody does have any questions, please type into your questions section of your go to webinar interface. As she said, we have plenty of time to answer any questions you have. Questions, thoughts, any ideas you have for interesting training you've done in your libraries. As you mentioned earlier in your session Megan, we share and borrow. My director here says we R&D that, rip off and duplicate in the nicest way. I am constantly looking at what other libraries are doing to be like, oh, that's a good thing. I'm gonna steal that idea. And more often than not, we as libraries are like, take it, take my idea, run with it. Yes, yes. So we did have a question earlier at the beginning that I didn't catch, but that's fine. And someone doesn't know and I get this because if you're not in the academic world, you might not know. What, I know, but if you want to explain what does ACRL stand for and what does ACRL do? Yes. So it's the Association of College and Research Libraries. It's basically American Library Association, but this one's for college and research libraries. They're basically our big professional ALA. They have a major conference every two years where it's a bunch of academic librarians in a room. Fascinating work going on there sometimes. Because the way it's different from ALA is that a lot of academic librarians are considered faculty. So we do go out and do our own research and stuff. That's not the case for every university. In fact, my prior position wasn't a faculty position, but that's what ACRL is. And the framework I was mentioning, it's the ACRL framework for information literacy in higher education. Essentially, how do we make information literate citizens? And so they have it broken down into these big ideas of what information literacy is, and it's very theoretical. It's an incredibly difficult document to take and make something that is active learning in the classroom. And so it breaks it down into specific, you know, an information literate person does this. You know, a person who is an advanced learner does this. And it's taking these big theoretical ideas and parsing them into specific hands-on activities is incredibly difficult, which is why my colleagues and I have often been like, we did that summer project where we sat down and were like, okay, how do we make these into actual teachable lessons? And we've turned a few of those things into webinars. We've done things in the classroom. It's basically immersing our students in the world of research in a way that it can connect these theoretical concepts. And one of my favorite ones that unfortunately I didn't get to do because I was on maternity leave, but my colleagues, they put, you know, different things on a beach ball. And there's this thing called the ACRL Sandbox where people can share these activities. And so these things on a beach ball, the students would grab it and let their hands were touching. And they had to be like, okay, how can I put these two sources, these two random sources in conversation with one another? And so it's getting at the idea of how do you integrate information from various areas? One of my colleagues wanted to do what they call it. Never have thought that anything to do with the other. Yeah. Yeah, it's really engaging our students in such a way like I'm trying to now teach citations as a form of TikTok video. Simply because I was like, I'm telling students, you know, when you stitch something or when you do what something on TikTok, that's getting at the idea of scholarship as a conversation, but you're also citing what that information came from. And so it's trying to get students to think, yeah. And again, part of that idea was stolen from another library. And so this is why information literacy and library instruction, when we're often called in, it's like, yeah, the library, here's the library, this is what we do. Here's our databases, here's how to search. That's what we're traditionally called for. And students, it's fine. You know, some of them get some stuff out about some of them don't. And so it's just a way to make it, oh, no, I actually need this in life. Because most students, when they leave, they're like, I'm never going to need APA again. I don't have to, you know, pay attention to APA citation. But when you say, hey, you know, a TikTok video is a form of citation. They start to think, oh, it's the concepts that we want to focus on those foundational core skills that everybody needs. Making it relatable and relevant. Yeah. All right, so we have some questions popping in here. Let's see here. Oh, you had mentioned your session you do at daycares. I want to know, also, are your slides for that presentation on your website? So I want to know if you'd be willing to share those slides. So those are, that's something I'm doing this upcoming summer. They don't exist yet, but they will be on my website. It is something that they're also going to record. So that recording will be available as well. But essentially, I'm taking the personal archiving webinar that is available on the UDC library's YouTube page. That's already available, but I'm giving it a parent's spin to be like, this is what you do with your kids art. This is what you do with all the photos on your phone.  What the heck do I do with it? And our daycare is wonderful and they've been doing these parent-based classes.  This summer, one of the teachers wanted to talk about, you know, how can you turn your kid's art into art you actually want to hang on your wall? And I was like, when should we were talking about this? I was like, can I do a personal archiving workshop simply because people need to know. Like, I remember when I was growing up, my parents had my dad's a librarian.  You can't save everything. I didn't know just how much art kids generate until I had one of my own. My husband and I have to go through it monthly because it's a stack, you know, that's like three inches high. And then each month we're going through and then once a year we go through and see what we already saved to be like, okay, is that still worth saving? And these are things that people don't obviously think about. And so it's building in a way to make, you know, managing all of the artifacts of our lives manageable. So that webinar will be up. It's just, it's happening in July. So TBD. Yeah. And that's, yeah, kids are so creative. They are always pushing out things like that. Yeah. Right. So keep an eye on her website then and you'll be able to get that. Yeah. All right. So see, does your faculty, here's the next question. Does your faculty share your webinars and their classes or how do you get students to watch them? Do you embed them in the LMS or? So a lot of our webinars are designed. We have, we target two audiences. We design webinars for students and then another subset for faculty. Everyone's invited to go to them, but that's just how we target them. They are hosted. We are a spring share library. So we use the lib app suite. So we have an events page where everything is listed. But when it comes to the actual content, I'm just marketing it through social media, through our newsletter and things like that. We also, for our faculty driven ones, we focus it. We have a center for teaching and learning. And so we co-market through them because faculty pay a little bit more attention to them sometimes. But depending on the content, I have the ability to email all students and faculty. Don't tell my university.  Students show up sometimes and we are prepared for that. But what we do notice is we post all of the recordings on YouTube. And those videos, when students, when we do this embedded librarian program or we're working with our faculty, we're like, hey, here's an asynchronous video you can share ahead of time. And so we can reuse that webinar content or we create tutorial videos. And right now the plagiarism one I made at the start of the pandemic, which is not very pretty because I was just trying to get it up there, is our most watched video simply because our faculty have literally used it. We are blackboard as our learning management system and they can embed it directly in their classes. And so when faculty reach out to us or we see a need, we're like, hey, we already have this video go ahead and embed it into your YouTube or embedded into your blackboard course. And that's how we get a lot of these videos in there. And it's one reason why we're okay with our webinars being shorter because it makes them more shareable after the fact.  I don't know if I want to see that. It's long, but 15 minutes. Time speed suddenly that's, you know, manageable. So we don't really sweat if we don't get a lot of attendance live because we know we're going to get more views after the fact. We're constantly telling people, sign up. You'll get the direct link after, as long as you're registered. But that's why we house everything on our YouTube simply because it makes things more shareable and thus more sustainable. And is that, is your YouTube, are those publicly available to anyone to go? Yes. Okay, great. And our webinars, anyone can attend. We have not locked anything down. We're not worried about there being a race and us crashing or zoom room. We're not worried about that. We have the same thing here. You have noticed that we do weekly, I do weekly webinar series here and compass live show, which is free and open to anyone to attend. Of course, librarians are mostly interested in it. But yes, we've noticed the same thing that our archives get way more views than the live show. And that's fine. I know not everybody can be available at 10 a.m. Wednesday mornings, 10 a.m. center time Wednesday mornings. I just care that the information is out there for someone to use and benefit from in whatever way works best for them. That's exactly what we think we're, we want the content to get out there, not necessarily the live view, which is why we also always share our email at the end to be like, Hey, get questions. Go ahead and email us. You know, that's another way we want to reach people is simply to be like, Here's the content. If you have questions afterwards, we're here to help. All right, so a few more questions here I want to get through someone says I'm interested in your library one on one course on blackboard. Can you share that content or structure or is that somewhere. So library one on one is it at the start of the pandemic. Sadly, we were also down in our information literacy librarian because her spouse moved bummer. We needed to create some asynchronous learning material. So what we had, what we did is we created these very short learning modules breaking down various concepts of research into what we hope to be, you know, if you did each one it was less than five minutes. And it's a mix of text downloadable flyers videos and things like that it is housed in our blackboard and unfortunately we can't share, you know, can't just export that. I can see about exporting the entire thing, but I'm not quite sure that said if there's one specific subject you're interested in I can cut and paste that stuff or I can send the videos that are housed in blackboard or all on our YouTube. So if there's some specific concept you're interested in, or I can create an outline of what we've covered. I'm happy to share that. Yeah, so check the YouTube and see if there's something you're looking for is there. Otherwise, yeah, reach out to Megan and see if there's something specific you want. Oh, that's a nice comment just came in. So I said, yes, I'd love the outline. Thanks. Okay, so Rochelle, yeah, reach out to Megan. There's room for their sender an email and I'm sure she'll get that. And the nice thing about that is it, we have made it as an organization and blackboard meaning it's perpetual it doesn't end each semester like a course would. And so we can also add new material and so I have a whole list of new modules I want to add including one on misinformation. You know, simply as time permits but it's helped us be like, Oh, faculty want this stuff but they don't want us to teach in their classroom at least we can reach out and say hey, find this. And so we can enroll students in fact many faculty have gotten used to at the start of the semester they send me their entire roster of students. I enrolled them in library 101 they stay enrolled until they leave the university. It's ungraded but we have quizzes after each module so students can test themselves and we've made it easy. It's only like four or five questions that can take it as many times as they want, but faculty have taken to using this as extra credit. So it's really helpful for their students to at least attempt to immerse them in those skills that they might not get otherwise. Yeah. All right, great. So yeah, I'm sure you'll be hearing from at least one person. See another question here I know you have non traditional student population. But have you ever thought about offering a webinar like life skills 101. Yes, simply a yes it's defining what life skills are most important right now. We jokingly say our students are every age of 17 to 70, but it's not so much a joke the number of students who have come up to me and said hey today is my 70th birthday. And so it's like life skills look different when you're 17 versus when you're 70. And so it's trying to figure out who do we work with like the library we can work more closely with career services, but a student applying for say an internship on the hill is going to look different than a 70 year old who's thinking I'm just back here and now I just want to part time job. And so it's, it's figuring out those life skills but one thing we have learned is a lot, almost all of our students come in and their first time academics first time in college. We do have some coming back for second degrees but they're so divorced from their first degree that the whole skill like the long line learning management system computers, you know I had some in the other days and I type my first papers on a typewriter what is the citation footnoting at the bottom automatic, you know, magic that is happening and so developing those, you know, study skills, navigating academia is a life skill the number of students who come to the library just looking for helping like, who the heck do I go to if I have a question about my account. That's, that's why the library is considered the helpful place because we have those connections to be like you can go here and talk to this person. Great. That's, there are lots of resources depending. Yeah, and yeah you do have such range and that's similar to public library thank you have people from all those that'd be a similar thing yet. All right, let's take someone here looking for more advice and this question is kind of kind of long in a small town public library getting attention and input has been my roadblock we don't know how to accomplish getting participation. We partner with groups representing all kinds of information and programs that locals say they want invest our own time and resources but attendance is so limited trying to offer hybrid options so people can consume on their own time is one option, but getting recognition of ROI when they haven't shown up. That's an issue. Yeah, so this is always hard we've all had a fence that people just don't show up to and it's, it's really annoying when people say, I want it I want it I want it and then they don't show up. And unfortunately, that's a problem for every library, small libraries big libraries.  Some things to ask is, do you assess those events after the fact for the people who do show up. Was it they asked for the event but the timing didn't work. Was it, you know, the timing was fine but you know they needed online or whatever. And it's also sometimes, particularly in smaller libraries, childcare, people might want to come to things but if they don't have childcare and libraries cannot be daycares. And so that that's a hard one. So, sometimes trying to partner with someone who may be able to provide childcare can be helpful, simply because a lot of people want to come to these events, they want to be able to focus and they can't do that if your kid is hanging on them. And so that's one thing. Another thing you can look at for ROI, particularly with hybrid events is make sure that monthly you're seeing okay, how are those recordings doing, and then pushing it that out. And so that's one way to do it. And so the ROI can look different ways. Yeah, you can focus on we spent X amount of dollars per person. That's one thing you can do, but you can also think of a greater impact, you know, what was the benefit to the community. Talk, if you can find people who attended to be like, what did you get out of this, how did you change the number of people who go to local library events for things like entrepreneurship who then go on to start businesses, or I've seen local libraries do things on, you know, hi, I'm thinking of running for office. What do I do about that? How many of them actually became candidates and may have been elected, things like that. You can look at ROI differently. When it comes to outreach, a lot of it is how do you spin it? How do you put the spin on that story to make it work for you? Because when it comes to telling the story of the library, yeah, there are numbers, but you want to focus more on the people you helped. So it's that storytelling that really makes it settling. Because oftentimes, particularly when you're writing reports, numbers mean nothing. Like, I don't know what that means in context. The story is what has the impact. And so that's how sometimes you can talk about ROI is what's the long tail on this event, you know, or did people talk about it afterwards? Was it covered in the news? Like, there are different ways. People talk about it on social media. What did it do for the library's brand image? Something like that. And so it depends more on each event, but those are some ways you can sort of put a spin on it to be like, well, it might not have gotten a lot of live attendance, but this is the other thing it did do. Yeah, you do have to kind of, I mean, it's what you've been saying, think outside the box. And yeah, that I do keep statistics, like I said, on our archive shows to those are just as useful and just as valid. And as doing the live things and having the bodies come into the building. And I think that's something that you do need to teach maybe people that don't realize that. That just because they didn't use the other buys and Billy didn't didn't mean doesn't mean we weren't getting the information out that we weren't helping people that people weren't benefiting and participating in a new way and what we've been providing. Yeah, and a sneaky way you can do it is be like we didn't event on this topic. Did we see an increase on checkouts or use of items related to that topic. Right.  Yeah, the results, the response. Absolutely. Because even if people don't attend them, I'd be like, Oh wait, no, I haven't been interested in learning more about it. Let me put all these books on hold. All right. I think I'll do one more question here since we are getting to the end of this hour. Okay, so it says, I think you might have mentioned this earlier but I guess we'll clarify because of the comment here. When it comes to your library 101 course, can anyone sign up for it or do you have to be registered through the school? Sadly, it is. It is locked down to UDC students and faculty. It's tied in our learning management system. We have thought about converting it over to our website. Because spring share would let us make these quizzes and modules, but the problem one, that's a lot of work. And two, blackboard is where our students and faculty already are. It is much easier to get them to pay attention on blackboard than it is to have them dive three layers deep into our website to find that. Mm hmm. Makes sense makes it because they were just saying it could be helpful for high school seniors heading to the post secondary academia world. But it would depend on if they are, you know, coming to your university or. Yeah, because a lot of the things we link to or like go to these databases, those aren't available to people who aren't at our university. True, true. Yes. All right. Okay. All right. Hi, that's last question I think we'll take we just do have a comment which I think it applies to you and possibly everyone who's presenting here today.  And when we do our recordings, you know, some videos is just recorded narrations on PowerPoint that we turn into a video sometimes we literally just set up a zoom room and record that way. It doesn't have to cost a lot of money. I do have a can of a pro account that eventually I'm going to get around to making really nice videos, but again, making nice video content takes time so we're starting with. It's much more than you think yeah. All right, I think we'll wrap it up here because we've got about a few more minutes before the next session is to start so thank you so much Megan this is great useful information everyone go check out her website. That's where her links will be on the recording for this will be available and we'll link to that as well or her slides will be. All right, I am going to pull presenter control back to my screen. So thank you so much Megan the ground and watch the rest of the conference if you like.


I'm ready to begin. Hello everyone, thank you for coming to my talk. I am Matthew, and I'm going to be telling you four stories about recreational maths. This is kind of like four talks I've given at shorter events, kind of crammed together into one longer talk, to keep you entertained for a full half an hour. First a little bit about me. I am a PhD student at UCL. Some of you might have seen me last time when I was just starting my PhD, I'm now two years in. I work on numeric analysis, so I work with PDs. If you are interested in acoustics or electromagnetics, talk to me afterwards. I work on this bit of software called Ben++, which is really nice. We can do really cool 3D simulations, but in reality I spend most of my time doing things like this, where I have simulated an electromagnetic wave bouncing off the EMF cap logo, because I didn't feel like working that day. On to the point of today's talk. The first story I'm going to tell you is about menace. Recently, machine learning has been in the news an awful lot with machines finally beating go. It's a big talking point, but a lot of the time you don't really get told how machine learning actually works. I'm going to explain to you one very simple aspect of machine learning, and tell you how to actually teach a computer to learn something. I'm going to explain it by explaining the machine built in the 1960s by this man, Donald Witschee. Before the 60s, he'd worked with Alan Turing at Splechley Park during the war, where we were two years ago. After that, in the 60s, he became interested in biology and machines and learning, and he built a machine called menace. This is a photo of his machine, menace. There are 304 matchboxes, which he has meticulously drawn, and noughts and crosses arrangement on each one, stuck little bits of carbon on each one, and filled each one with little tokens. Menace stands for machine-educable noughts and crosses engine. Brilliant acronym. This is his machine, which he designed, and it can learn to play noughts and crosses. How it works, I'm going to explain with an example game. The menace is going to play as noughts, and we're going to play as crosses. To start off, we find the box which has this position drawn on it. As I said, each box has a position drawn on it, and we find the box which has no hands on it. We shake this box, we open the box, and we find a red token at the front. A red token is code for going here, so menace has made its move.  Then again, it's menace's move, so then we find the box which has this design drawn on it, so it will be that box. We shake that box, we open the box, and we find a blue token, and a blue token is code for going here. Now it's my turn again, I go here, I'm at this point quite happy with myself, I seem to be doing quite well. It's menace's turn, so I find the box again with that on it. Shake the box, open the box, and a green token. The green token is code for going here, so it's blocked me. My move, I'm now very, very happy with myself. Then it's menace's turn, I find that box, shake the box, open it, find a yellow token, and yellow is code for going there, and I go there, and I've won. So this is a game which is early on before it's done much learning. It's not very good, and I've just destroyed it. But here is where the learning happens, and this is how the machine learning works. I take that token out of the box, which means this was probably a bad move because it led to losing. It's now less likely to do that. I take that token away, it's less likely to go there. I take these tokens away, and it's less likely to make the mistakes it made again. If you play about 50 games against this, it gets pretty good at drawing with you, just by those simple mechanics. You should also, as well as losing, if you draw, you add one bead, and if you win, you add three beads. So you're encouraging it to do more of the things it led to winning, discouraging it to do things led from losing. This matchbox machine, it actually does particularly well. This is the graph of Donald's tournament with it. So we spent a whole weekend playing 240 games against this thing, carefully adding and taking away tokens, and plotting out what happened. So this is starting at zero here. It is the change in the number of tokens he's got. So you can see it started off by losing lots of games for the amount of tokens decreased, and then it got pretty good at learning here and increased. And then each of these is where he changed his strategy. So you can see here he changed his new strategy, which you hadn't seen before, so it doesn't know how to win yet, but after about 20 games, it picks up, it's worked out to beat him on that strategy, and it carries on like that. So this is how to teach 304 matchboxes how to play Norse and Crosses. And if you want to play against it, you can go to this page on my website where I've built a JavaScript version of it to save you the time of building one yourself. Alternatively, you could go away and build your own copy of it, which is what Oliver just here did when I did this talk at CCC. He got his matchboxes, printed all of these, which all have the positions in them, filled all up, laser cut a brilliant box for it. But if you have any ideas what to do with them, I'm sure you'd like to hear from you because did you find anything to do with them? Oh, nice. So he's approximated Pi by dropping them on parallel lines because a large number of straight sticks will do that for you. Brilliant. Right, on to story number two. This is about a Twitter bot I created about two years ago called MathsLogic Bot, so it says, I tweet logical tautologies. I'm currently working my way through propositional calculus. You can read our book here. And so it does these brilliant, really interesting tweets like this. So I'm going to explain to you what I mean by logical tautologies and propositional calculus and what this bot is actually doing. So this is part... propositional calculus, it's a form of logic in Maths. So it's a way of writing sentences and then analysing these and analysing the system of logic itself rather than just using logic to prove things. And so you build up these sentences in it from certain symbols. And these are the symbols we are allowed to use. So we're allowed to use variables. So I'm going to use the letters A to Z and then carry on with Greek letters if I need any more as variables. So they can be things which are set to be either true or false. I'm going to use not. This symbol like that means not. This symbol means implies. This symbol means if and only if or it's kind of like is equal to. This is and and this is all and I'm going to use brackets. And these are the only symbols I'm allowed to use in this story. And they're helpful on the side of the slide if you need to look up what they mean. And from these symbols we're allowed to build what are called formulae. And these are kind of strings of symbols that make sense together. We have three open brackets because that is nonsense, it doesn't work. So we have rules, we're allowed to build formulae and there's three rules. The first rule is that every variable is a formula. The second rule is that if I've got a formula then doing not that formula that's still a formula. And if I've got two formulae then I can put any of these between them and wrap them in brackets. So for example A is a formula because of rule one. A implies A is a formula and rule three because I've taken two copies of that one and put an arrow between them. That is a formula by... B is a formula by the top one. This is a formula and put them together by the third rule, you get that. And lots of other things like that are formulas. You can combine these symbols and it doesn't really matter what they mean but they make sense because if you read them out as using these you can have A implies A. You have B if and only if A implies A. It can make sense and you can work out kind of the truth of the sentence. So what the bot is doing is it's tweeting the tautologies and tautologies are formulae that are true whatever the values of the variables. For example A or not A because if A is true then that says true or not true. So then true or not true is like true or false and like one of true and false is true. And if A is false it says false or not false so it's like false or true. So it makes sense. It's got to be or not to be. One of them has to be true. Similarly A if and only if A is true because if and only if is very similar to the equal sign so it's something like of course A is equal to A. That's a tautology. However A and B is not a tautology because if A and B are both false then that's obviously not going to become out true. So that is not a tautology. So which is interesting is that in the sentences in this language that are true whatever we do with these variables. Okay so I decided to try and make a Twitter bot that tweets all of these that are less than 140 characters long. So very briefly how this works is I started by running through all possible strings of symbols. So forgetting about formally for now just running through them like this. So I did all the strings which are one character long then start with on the ones two characters long and then for each of these I first check that it's actually a formula. So at this point I can get rid of almost everything on the board because one and two character long things are almost certainly not formulae. So once I've got that so I'm running through all the formulae and checking they're valid and then I try all the different truth assignments so for the first one if A is false if A is true is it true and if it is always true I tweet it and you get lovely tweets like this. So this is one that Totology did back in April which I'm not going to attempt to read out now but you can believe me that that is always going to be true whatever the values of A and B and maybe you can sit down there for us and work out why. Brilliantly for a while Twitter had this automatic translate function here so if you clicked on that brilliantly it realised it was in Hungarian and what I was actually trying to say was the arrow A and all that garbage which was very helpful of Twitter so I've got rid of that feature now for no apparent reason. Okay so the first 18 Totologies are these and so there's a view I've been through there they seem pretty reasonable the first one's like A is the same as A if A is true then A is true either A or not A are true or A or not A are true and then some more and at this point I began to wonder how many Totologies there were going to be of each length so you can see that there's two that have five characters there's two that have six characters there's quite a lot more that have seven characters there's more that have this many characters and I started wondering what this sequence of the number of Totologies would look like so I added it to the Online Psychopathic of Intersequences which if you haven't heard of it it's a really really great online tool if you're ever trying to solve some problems like during my PhD it comes up a lot you get some numbers coming out you type them there and you can almost certainly find out what the sequence is and there's loads of links to facts about it so this sequence I started trying to think about some properties this sequence might have and I realised a few things firstly if you've got a Totology then not not that Totology is also a Totology it's like if something's true then not not that thing must also be true because the knots kind of cancel each other out which means the number of Totologies of length n plus 2 is going to be bigger than the number of Totologies of length n because for every Totology of length n we can make another one with two knots in front so there's got to be more of them that are two strings and symbols longer similarly you can get lots of situations like this where you've got a Totology and you say something doesn't matter or this thing which we know is always true so you get that the number of Totologies of length n plus 4 has also got to be bigger the number of Totologies of length n so it looks like as we get these strings longer and longer we're going to be getting more and more Totologies so I made the conjecture that it's going to be increasing so whenever we have another character we're going to get more Totologies but it turns out it's completely not true because the next one is 6 so it already decreases but carrying on from there we get 57, 88 373, 554 2086 and so on and so it looks like maybe that 6 is just a weird blip because our number of symbols is quite short and maybe it does increase forever so my modified conjecture is for n bigger than 8 it's going to be increasing but I have no idea if this is true or not and no real idea how to prove this so if anyone has any ideas I'd love to talk to you afterwards about how we might go about seeing if this is true or not brilliant my third story I'm doing great for time is about optimal Pac-Man so this is an idea I actually had at the last EMF camp when I was in the arcade tent I was playing Pac-Man and I got to wondering which route I should actually take on Pac-Man because it's not obvious where's the best direction to go at all points and this is one I got down to sitting down a few weeks afterwards and working out what I should do in Pac-Man so I was ready to come here and be better at Pac-Man it reminded me of a few problems and there's some bits of maths I used so the first problem it reminded me of is oh I should say Pac-Man you want to know what Pac-Man is so this is the map you've got here and find the route in this is the difficult question I was thinking about and it reminded me of this problem this is a problem from the 1700s which was solved by this man Leonard Euler and led to the whole creation of the field of graph theory and this is a map of Königsberg which is not very well drawn because I drew it myself where you had this town with four islands and these seven bridges going between the islands and the townsfolk of Königsberg used to play a really fun game where they'd walk around these islands and try and cross each bridge once and exactly once so for example you'd go over there and keep going around this way and you're stuck and you've missed a bridge so they wanted to find a route to go over every bridge to see lots of the town but they didn't want to go back in themselves because that's really boring and they found this really really hard to do but kept trying anyway until Leonard Euler came along and he worked out why they'd been finding it so hard because in fact it was impossible and he explained why this was impossible and he did this first by simplifying the map you've got down to what he called a graph like this so these are exactly the same diagrams but here I've shrunk each time down to a dot I just put lines in because we don't care what the map looks like we just care how the bridges connect the islands and this is what mathematicians confusingly call a graph and not like the X and Y coordinates things we call these graphs and then he had the real important thing he noticed here was that so we're trying to look for a route which goes up all these bridges once but to find that route if you think about walking around this island if I'm walking down here and I arrive at this island I need to leave this island again and I need to leave this island again so every time I come into one of these islands I'm going to have to leave again which means it's only possible to do this route if I compare at the edges at each vertex so here we're going to have a problem because if we come in on one and go out on another we've got this one out which eventually if we come in on here we're stuck so it turns out the important thing about this problem that he solved is that if you've got any edges with an odd number of bridges any islands with an odd number of bridges it's going to be impossible and so this is impossible because you've got three islands there, three bridges there three bridges there, three bridges there and five bridges there so every island you're going to get stuck at so it's impossible to find one of these routes okay so cool we've done this with a 300 year old problem how about Pacman so if you take Pacman and make it into a graph you get this graph here so I've just taken each of the points where multiple routes meet such as here and here I've made it into one of these points and I've replaced all of the curvy edges with lines because I don't care about distances and how it's arranged I just care about how things are connected and each of the nodes in red have an odd number of edges so we have a lot of odd number of edges we have a lot of islands that have an odd number of edges so we definitely can't do this so it's impossible to complete Pacman without looping back in yourself which is not surprising because if any of you have played Pacman you will know it's impossible to complete Pacman without looping back in yourself because you can't do it it's really hard to do because it's impossible so I've not actually solved the problem yet though so I've used this 300 year old thing and found that it's impossible so we want to do something better now and work out how should I be doing Pacman because I've got to do some repeating so this is a different problem related to the first one called the Chinese Postman problem where so the Chinese Postman problem is you've got a postman who needs to go down all the rows to deliver letters and he wants to do that by walking the shortest distance possible so it's a slight extension of the last one like instead of just not going back in yourself it's if you have to go back in yourself what's the least amount of going back in yourself that you have to do and the way you can go about solving this going back in yourself is a bit like building a copy of the bridge right next to the first bridge so for example on Königsberg you could imagine two extra bridges there which are really just repetitions of this bridge and this bridge and now by adding these lines everything has an even number of edges and so I could do a route around this or I could have added these edges here and again made everything even or I could have added those three edges there and made everything even we're interested in the shortest way of doing this so looking at these three options if we add up the total length of those two bridges add up the length of those two bridges and add up the length of those three bridges whichever those add up to the least that's going to be the shortest way of doing this path going over all the different bridges so we need to look at all the combinations of matching up these odd edges for Pac-Man it turns out this is the shortest pairings for Pac-Man and with this number of edges it took my computer all night to solve this because as you add edges the number of possible ways of pairing up increases really really quickly so the Pac-Man map was much bigger this would be almost impossible to solve because it gets out of hand really really fast but luckily for Pac-Man we managed to do this so these are the edges I want to repeat so I got very good at Pac-Man the day after I worked this out and there should be some sound coming on now this is my attempt at Pac-Man it's eerily quiet so I've repeated that edge then I go around here and I've repeated that edge no I haven't, I've gone over that one I've repeated that edge there and I'm going up the top so there's that edge repeated and that edge repeated and that one and that one another one repeated so I need to repeat that one down there next next is there and then finally go back and fill in the one I hadn't repeated over there and that is the quickest possible way to complete Pac-Man and of course then it starts all over again and I couldn't be bothered to do it more than once in a row so I stopped the video there okay so my final story which is actually more of a puzzle than a story so I thought it'd be fun to send you away with something to go and think about and something to do so this is a few puzzles I've been thinking about recently that I've been working on I've got a few ideas how to solve some of them and not others so this is something to keep you entertained this evening when you get bored of going to all the workshops which will never happen because there's so much to do here so this is a puzzle first of all taken from Starting Points by Bamwell's Swords and Tata which is a really good teaching book full of kind of investigatory maths and the question in this book is you take a rectangle like this 4x3 rectangle here and you fire a ball across at 45 degrees so that it goes down here carries on bounces off the side and carries on eventually it ends up in the top right corner so for a 4x3 rectangle the bouncing ball ends up at the top right corner so the puzzle is for different sized rectangles what corner will the line end up in and I'm not going to tell you I'm going to leave you with that to go away and think about because it's really fun to work out but it's not that difficult you can work this out in about 20 minutes you can get a good answer and work out why that would be but from this there's a few related puzzles I got wondering about so the first thing I thought was how many squares does the line go through on its way so in the 4x3 rectangle there's a diagonal line going through every single of one of the smaller squares but for different sizes for example we've got a 3x6 here we only go through those squares so when will the line go through all the squares is another question and this is one I haven't actually worked out the answer to yet so I'm probably going to work this out myself this evening if I can and a third question is how many corners does it go through so as the lines going round on the 4x3 rectangle it goes through those corners but if you take a general rectangle how could you count the number of corners it goes through which is another problem to pose I have solved this one I was very happy with the way I worked this one out and when will it go through all the corners and this is related to there's a problem called the cross-dangle cover problem by Garish Corpor which he blogged about here he was in a maths lecture got a bit bored and started doodling on rectangles so he got his rectangle and he started drawing crosses going in a diagonal way so fairly similar to what I was doing he did some crosses going like this and bouncing around the rectangle like that and eventually reached another corner so kind of similar to what I was doing but a little bit different and then he asked the question how many of the squares ended up with crosses inside them and I was very happy when I found this on the internet because it turns out this is exactly the same as that rectangle here is one square larger than that one but if you connect up the middle points of that then the pattern I just drew across is exactly the same as the pattern I have on my rectangle up there so his problem is kind of a way of looking at my problem upside down so by having solved that I managed to solve his problem so that is three fun puzzles for you to work on this evening and let me know if you find some answers because it would be good to confirm I'm right and find out answers for the ones I haven't yet solved but for now this is a clue so when I said I was bouncing around the rectangle you couldn't imagine that you've actually got mirrors here and the ball is going straight down that will really help that immediately solves two of the problems so that is a clue for anyone who wants to go and work on this but for now that is all I'm going to talk to you for now so I'll go to the bar now and you can come and chat with me and ask some questions thank you for listening


Cancer cells use lipid metabolism to produce energy and build up biomolecules for rapid growth. Fluorescence microscopy is often used for cancer research, but it cannot label small lipid molecules without disturbing their natural activity. However, coherent Roman scattering, CRS, microscopy can overcome this challenge by providing chemical selectivity, high sensitivity, sub-micrometer resolution, and fast imaging of lipid molecules in live cells. Recently developed hyperspectral and multiplex CRS microscopy further enhances molecular selectivity by using distinct Roman peaks to identify different lipid metabolites. These advancements have enabled researchers to gain new insights into the role of lipid metabolism in cancer development and progression. This article was authored by Shuo Zhang, Ye Shuan He, and Xu Huayu. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


I don't even know what to say. It's negative 30 degrees out in the beautiful state of Minnesota. I just got done seeing Take Thrin, Taken 3. It is, it is really bad. It's one of the worst movies I've seen. Oh, we're in 2015.  I don't consider the first Taken to be an amazing film. I think it was a good action flick. It was, it was a nice change of pace from the superhero stuff. I'd give it like an eight, I guess.  And number three continues suit. It is very clear this should have been a one-off franchise, but no, we had to have three movies and Hollywood seems to have put even less into the third installment than the last two combined. The special effects are ridiculously bad. The shaky cam is insanely overused. There's, there's shots where there's just a cop car sitting still and the camera will like zoom in and out six times on the license plate. License plate has zero value. We're just doing it to make everything so intense. It's clear they didn't want to take any time doing choreography. Instead, they mask it with quick jump cuts and quick hand motions and nothing else. There's no value. John Wick blew this out of the water. If you want to see some good hand to hand, if you want to see some masterful camera work, go to John Wick. Well, rent it or buy it actually, whatever. Liam Neeson is Liam Neeson. I don't even know the guy's name. We have three movies and I still, it's like Brian something, I think. This is the third installment. We know nothing about this guy other than he loves his family, loves his daughter and his wife. Obviously, the plot is the wife dies. He's framed for murder. It's kind of a fugitive slash a born identity situation, but it doesn't have any of the creativity that those films have. Instead, we have multiple car chases that are very poorly done. I think he actually kills six or seven people in a high-speed chase. I'm innocent.  I will stretch my imagination very far for action films, but there's a point where he falls down an elevator shaft in a car.  How did he get out? There's really not much to like. There's maybe one or two good shots in the whole flick. Everything else is a throwaway. I really don't have much else to say. I am going to feud with Jonathan Paula next week, Taken Trilogy vs. The Born Trilogy, and I mean, Born is obviously better at this point. I think if the other two Taken movies were as strong as the first, we'd have ourselves a fight, but I don't even know what the hell we're gonna do.  I'm gonna give this a 3 out of 10. Do not see it. Keep what remains of the Taken franchise intact with the first one. Just keep that one in your mind. Skip two if you never saw it. Skip three for sure. My buddy turned me about the hour and a half mark and says nobody actually got Taken in this one, in which I replied, oh yes, a whole lot of people got Taken. Everybody in the audience.