Hello, everyone. Hello, fellow users. Good late afternoon, Europe. Good morning, America. Good evening. Good night to our friends in Australia. And that corner of the world, my name is Federico. I'm a bioinformatician and I'm joining you from Mainz, Germany. It's my immense pleasure to chair this joint keynote today about communication for these global, very global additional views are. I see that our speakers are already with me on stage, so we are pretty much all set. First things first, one of the things that make all of this conference taking place in such a smooth and colorful way is thanks to our sponsors. So before we start with the keynote itself, I kindly ask you to please join me in listening to what our sponsor Absilon is willing to share in this short message with us. When I work in Absilon, I've joined Absilon in April and I work as project leader. Today, I would like to show you an app. This is the application that I prepared for our studio Shiny contest. And actually, it's not a typical app. It's a story. But before we start, let me tell you that the whole UI of this application was built with Shiny Fluent and Shiny Fluent is one of the packages that we built also here in Absilon. So make sure you check this out later. And now let's start with the story. This is the story of Adam. Adam is an R developer and he's a bit frustrated recently. He's frustrated because he received an email from John, his manager, right before the weekend. In the email, John asked Adam to finish one very small task before client demo on Monday. So Adam checked the task and although he was extremely unhappy, he decided to take it and assign it to himself. And by the way, a small off topic here. Look at this functionality. It's called People Picker. And I must say, this is my absolutely favorite one from Shiny Fluent. So you need to check this out. So coming back to the story. Adam assigned the task to himself and started working on that. But as it usually turns out in such situations, the task was much bigger than expected. And Adam needed to spend the whole weekend at work. But he finally managed to finish it and he was ready to present on Monday. Right when he was joining the call, he received a text from the client saying, sorry, Adam, I can't join the call. But don't worry, the priorities has changed. Which actually means that what Adam was working on throughout the whole weekend isn't that important anymore. So I think now you can imagine how frustrated Adam was. And though it's not a true story, I think we've all been there. So if you want to change something, I would encourage you to check our careers page. We have plenty of open positions for developers and project leaders. So if you have any questions about our recruitment process, about the positions, don't hesitate to contact me. You can also find contact details to Paulina from the HR team at the bottom of the page. So if you prefer, you can also contact with Paulina and I'm sure she will be happy to answer all your questions. And from my experience, as I also joined Absolon recently, I must say I have very good friends from the recruitment process. It was really smooth. Also later, the onboarding process, it's really well organized. So I must say that Absolon makes everything to make that process, which I think is a bit stressful for everyone, the process of changing your job. But Absolon makes it as smooth and pleasant as possible. So I hope you feel encouraged. This is all from me today. Thanks a lot and see you on board. Thank you. And we are back all together. So again, thanks for joining me in this virtual round of applause for our sponsor, Absolon. And let's go back to the main slide set. And let me please introduce it properly to our next two speakers. We will hear about the importance of communication. So first of all, the topic we will be working. We all are working with data. We need to communicate results in an accurate and efficient way if we want our work to make a real impact. And therefore, this is what brings the values of a single analysis and the data containing them to elevate it to make a real impact. So I am very humbled and at the same time honored to share the stage with two excellent speakers, which incidentally share also almost the name. So it's going to be a Catherine and a Catherine. So you will probably not be able to dissect who is who. So I kind of have a nice deal with them that is going to be Catherine with C and Catherine with K. Our first speaker in this joint keynote is Catherine Gichero. Please, Catherine, join me on stage. She will provide us with a perspective of a veteran data journalist working mainly on gender, health and development issue. And she's joining us from Kenya. Welcome, Catherine. Good afternoon to you. It's actually, sorry, it's actually 8 o'clock, almost 7.30. No worry. It's perfect. Our second speaker in this joint keynote is Catherine Hayhoe. She's an atmospheric scientist whose work is centered around what the effects of climate change are on the people and on the places we live in. She joins us from Texas US. Welcome, Catherine. Good morning to you. I think I didn't butcher this one. Before we start, we needed to set up a kind of a few basic rules on how we would like you to enjoy this at best. Each of our speakers will first present their contribution in a consecutive way. And while they do so, we encourage you to ask questions already in the Q&A, upvote the ones which have been already proposed or ask them in the slack lounge. So we will make sure that we use our time at best. Of course, we will refer to the correct person. So follow the Catherine C and Catherine K nicknames if you want. And after the two individual talks, I'll be kind of opening up the virtual doors of our common living room where all the questions can be addressed to any of the speakers, maybe the same question to both of them, so that we can gain a lot of extra insight by cross-asking these questions. Okay, let's now get the stage ready for Catherine. Catherine is an award-winning journalist. She is an international center for journalists night fellow. She currently spearheads the Africa Women Journalism Project. She's been a co-founder of East Africa's first budget and public finance fact-checking and verification initiative called PESA check. And among her many acknowledgements over the years, she was recognized with a courage in journalism award. Catherine, I look very much forward to your talk. Please, the stage is yours. Thank you very much, Federico. I'm so glad to be here. And it's quite a privilege to join all of you in all your different spaces and in different times. I think the pandemic has showed us that we don't need to be all in one place to be able to have an interesting conversation. I just wanted to, today I will not be talking too much about what we, I mean I'll definitely be telling you about how I see data journalism now, the uptake of data journalism in our country as well as within the continent. So I'll essentially be talking about how journalists are using data to tell compelling stories about the pandemic, but also how we can use data to tell compelling stories about many other issues. I just wanted to start by setting the scene by saying that journalists have always used data except most times, most of the times, most journalists don't think that what they're doing, what they're doing is actually data journalism. And one of the things is that the concept has been data journalism, you need to have a lot of advanced computer assisted reporting equipment, which most of us don't really have. And actually, if we do have them, it's not in all the newsrooms, you need, you need to have access in advanced quantitative methods, which again, not all journalists have and not most journalists have. And this has also, this has been a problem in most of our newsrooms. There is also a gender dimension when it comes to the uptake of data journalism in the continent, according to the recite that was conducted in Tanzania and Zambia, for example, the researchers found that a lot of women journalists were very skeptical about the practice of data journalism. And very few of them were actually interested in taking it up. Beyond elite news organizations like the nation media group in Kenya, which is actually regional and premium times in Nigeria, for example, even quite a number of news organizations in South Africa, many of them are not yet introducing, most of these newsrooms are actually introducing data journalism, but in a very slow rate. And this is because they don't actually have the specific skills that are needed to be able to do data journalism. It is therefore something that is still in its infancy and it is still being received and its adoption is also being received with a bit of skepticism, a lot of curiosity, but also some skepticism. In many of our newsrooms also, the practice of data journalism is actually spearheaded by a core group of our few champions who have the skills to adopt data journalism. That is one of the objectives that we as AWJP have in providing the women journalists we work with with the skills with the data journalism skills that they can then become innovators in their own newsrooms. And we do this by making sure that they actually learn how to not only wrangle but analyze but also present data. The diversity of actors such as programmers, designers, illustrators are not available in most of our newsrooms and therefore data journalism is yet to become something that is internalized within our newsrooms. Again, just to set a stage in terms of the situation as far as data journalism is concerned, most of the push for data journalism has been done or has been done with the support of international news, not news organizations but actually civil society organizations or non-profits who in negotiating their roles in activism and advocacy have realized the importance of having journalists as mediators. And this has had an impact on the kind of data journalism that is being done. For example, just like Federico mentioned, I co-founded, I was privileged to co-found the PESA check which is East Africa's first checking organization. And we did this with the support of international budget partnership because there was a dire need for informed reporting on public finance and budgets. And because of that initially the whole fact checking was around fact checking statements by public figures or even news organizations around the issue of budgets and public finance. And the idea is not only to inform but to also hold those who are spending our tax shillings to account and being able to do that in a way that can personalize that information. Because as you understand budgets tend to be too dense in terms of numbers but actually personalizing, being able to personalize that information so that people can consume it and be able to make informed decisions with that. The obvious start of data journalism is I'll be able to share one of the, sorry, just give me a need to share my screen with you so that I can be able to show you what I am presenting in terms of the, yeah, here we are. Sorry about that. I have been talking without actually showing you some of the slides I had prepared for this so you will forgive me for him fumbling a little bit. Yeah, let me share this with you all. Aditi, maybe you can help me with the screen share of the slide three? I'm not sure. Yeah, slide three. Sorry, I wasn't able to get the, here we are. Yeah, share screen. Yeah, that's the one I was hoping for. Anyhow, the obvious, I mean for me the biggest challenge that we face as data journalists is actually accessing data because most of the data is usually collected by National Statistics Office and the problem has always been that sometimes the data that government departments and government ministries collect such as the Ministry of Finance, Communications, Transport and all the rest. It's usually not accessible or it's not made available to citizens or for that matter to journalists and that tends to make it very difficult for journalists especially if you're interested in accessing data. And one of the other things is that a lot of private sector organizations and even not for profit organizations have a lot of data. They do collect a lot of data but again access to this data is not available to journalists because they either share it amongst themselves or they share it maybe with government but even then sometimes they also don't want to share it with the journalists because they want to share with people who are able to pay for it because obviously there's a high cost in data collection. So I can understand why they are unwilling to share that their data freely but it also makes it a bit of a challenge for most journalists who are interested in doing data journalism. In the early 2000 I know all of you understand about the open data movement where most governments were encouraged to kind of make public whatever data they had to make public the data that they have been collecting about their citizens or about whatever policies that they are implementing. Then the evolution of the open data movement was quite substantial but it's still very far from maturity because finding data is often very unstable and very inadequate. We actually have a big challenge especially in like I mentioned getting data and then in the last few years there's been this data for development mantra which seems to have taken every government at least in sub-Saharan Africa. Every government is sending us some data for development. You need data to make evidence based decisions and all the rest of it but what has been of concern is that amongst this in the midst of all this and because there's lack of the expertise internally especially expertise in handling big data the UN among others have been encouraging African governments and NGOs to work with US and European based private sector actors who seem to have who have the expertise and the knowledge to work with big data and the idea here is for this government to be able to work with this European or US based experts to be able to understand how big data can be used to improve their service delivery as well as monitoring in real time their development activities. As governments have been urged to do this there's this question about where the data is collected and the analysis is I mean I can understand why governments would want to take up this kind of that kind of origin from the UN and others but then the problem with that is once this data is taken out of our continent and it compounds the inequalities that already exist and and it means that we cannot do we cannot develop homegrown expertise in big data analysis and also hamper the capacity of our innovators for me the real value of big data is not the data itself nor this technical expertise but really the analysis that we can give we can we can make about this big data and also be able to put to bring on board local insights into how this data really references or impacts on our situation not from some other understanding of this data so for me it's the happy married between the technical expertise as well as the local understanding that leads to innovative use of data and that is now where when you have this kind of data being able to communicate what it means and then the other thing is even where the data is available there are numerous gaps and unfortunately this has come through especially now during the pandemic because a lot of the data we're getting is very general it's not really granular enough for us to be as generally is to be able to actually understand what is going on with the pandemic and who is where is and how is this pandemic impacting on specific subgroups within the population or even especially the marginalized communities within our societies and that that has really kind of you have this homogeneous reporting of data about the pandemic but really it doesn't give you granular enough details to be able to say are the measures that the government is taking either to do lockdowns or to institute car fuels or whatever it is are they making sense and and how can we be able to inform or even critique whatever is the government is doing especially as far as the whether it's the rollout on vaccines or whether it's the measures that the government is taking are we do we have we don't have enough granular data to be able to understand that and it also doesn't help us to say okay we have COVID in yeah for example we have COVID in Kenya yes everybody knows that but where are the areas which are worst affected and are there local measures that can be taken just to deal with that place if it's a zone or whatever because it's been very generalized information and the other thing is also I've been for me I've been wondering when we have been told X number of people because we do get daily updates of how many people get infected or infected or whatever have been tested really tested and found to be positive but then the question is at this is the government including those who are who are symptomatic in those affected because they may have it but they are not showing the signs of this disease and then are they are they are not even telling us that those with underlying conditions being counted amongst the ones who are dying I mean we don't know and it would really be informative and really interesting to be able then to say okay when you're told to do this this is what it means if you have this underlying condition not just to assume everybody it's happening homogeneously to everybody at the same time in the same way I mean it would also help us in understanding why are certain measures being taken by the government I keep on grappling with this idea we the initial stages there was the cafes there was the lockdown and soft or hard whatever then we started easing the lockdowns but then why if we don't understand how this disease is spread and where this general measures really having any impact other than punishing people quote unquote I'm using the word punish because when you have a county lockdown our county is almost like a real moment it's locked down it means there's no movement in and out what does that mean for people because we are all interrelated in all our different the in terms of economics in terms of everything schools for example schools are about to be closed now but one one county might be shut down because the spread of the pandemic I mean the pandemic has become too it's too much and but then the question is how what what are those kids who are in boarding schools in those areas going to do if they have to travel out of there to go to their homes in other areas anyhow to make a long story short insufficient data makes it difficult for us to to to to work but we have to we generally have to sift through multiple reports to find trends and in some instances governments some governments have been downplaying the pandemic by doctoring the data that they released I mean a good example is Tanzania where actually there was no data being reported there were no there was no there was no covid because there was no there was but they were not releasing any data I think the situation has eased up somewhat since then but without official data and then what it meant is that the journalists who are working with especially as well as other journalists in Tanzania actually had to start reporting not about covid cases or people dying from covid but actually looking at the high insta you start trying to find data around the high instance of maybe people who were dying from pneumonia or other respiratory diseases or even using anecdotal information about night barriers not that there were or maybe there were a few but really we had to go that way because it's not possible to it wasn't possible to get any data from the government and they also made it possible made it actually criminal offense to to report on any data that is not released by the government authorities and the other thing is also in terms of the data we're getting it sometimes doesn't have historical context so you maybe get data that is being released in the last 24 hours but not the one maybe last week or last week but one so you have to start looking for it and kind of just to show how the trend is happening but under the guise of actually controlling information some governments have also enacted laws again outside Tanzania because I think some governments don't want to be criticized the manner in which they are handling the pandemic so I think Tanzania has eased up somewhat so at least now we're getting data from there at least statistics daily statistics about the number of people hospitalized or affected or infected with by the disease we'll not go too much into the obstacles but I want to say one thing despite all this I mean in terms of accessing data in Africa we can write a whole book about which I won't but it will be the the challenges are not insurmountable but and I'm happy to say that we're able to somehow manage and get to to to do something as far as reporting and using data and communicating data with our audiences are despite all this it is data journalism is growing yeah a pace I wouldn't say fast a pace and I think the main attraction for this is the ability to be able to tell stories with engaging visualizations I mean yeah I can I can describe something but I think a picture tells a thousand words is better than a thousand words and for me the ability to visualize and put this huge numbers or small numbers or context contextualize these numbers into something that is visually is really really attractive for us it's just another layer of our storytelling and I want to quote Paul Bradshaw who I believe is the one of the fathers of data journalism when he was asked okay what makes data journalism different from the rest of journalism and his answer was perhaps it's their possibility that open up when you combine traditional nose for news and the ability to tell a compelling story with a sheer scale and range of digital information now available those possibilities can come at any time at any stage of the journalistic process using programming to automate the process of gathering and combining information is one of them some newsrooms can be able to get a designer data analyst to assist in the interpretation but for freelancers and small newsrooms who don't have the capacity or don't have the resources for that they have to depend on either collaborating with people who have those skills and that for me is is quite interesting because then you have people who are non journalists who are coming into the new space we're coming into the journalism space because we have seen a need for their services where previously we may not have thought we needed them in our newsrooms and one of the one way like I mentioned earlier AWJP apart from training we trained the fellows as well as provide them with the skills to be able to do this on their own hoping that they will become those internal champions in their newsrooms so that they can encourage the uptake of data journalism I've been also able we've also been able to to to to get journalists to see the need to to share actually not only share but actually to collaborate across newsrooms because one user one small newsroom has one skill another small newsroom has another skill if they combine the two skills together they have a team and it's not necessarily kind of cannibalizing the different newsrooms it's actually been able to to share what what what what what you can be able to combine in your resources to do something together and that's not necessarily the same story but actually the skills that I need one newsroom needs an analyst another needs an illustrator and both of them can actually work together so collaboration is quite key to that I am going to talk about the road data itself is oh yeah actually I wanted to talk about our I mean a lot of us when I talk about training people training journalists most of us know how to use excel and google shit and I'm hoping that uh at least if we haven't got I mean most journalists at least know how to use an excel sheet and if they haven't been at least learning how to use that but there's also something that I've come to realize that be there's much more beyond the that that we can do with data which a google sheet and an excel sheet cannot do and I think for me that is where learning a program in language and I'm not saying are only but are for journalists it's the it's it's it's not difficult I mean if I can learn it so can everybody else I'm not a tech I'm not a techie but I am saying I've never wanted to be a coder but when I looked and working with our I've just said okay it's very intuitive it's very it's not very complicated and I don't need to learn too much stuff I don't really want and I'm not saying it's there's anything wrong with learning it but it's just that that is not my strength but at least using our it does come in handy especially when we're hunting big data and and the other thing is also it's the fact that you're able to do interesting visualizations there are very many other free tools which can help you do many interesting visualizations and stuff but the fact that you can use our for analysis as well as visualizations that makes sense for me and I really think it's one thing I would encourage journalists to learn if just understand how it works even if you're not going to have to do it every single day but I think it's one of the things that can be that journalists can be able to do because apart from telling stories we really need to be able to to to kind of contextualize and maps and chats and stuff can help us do that so with our make sense and also it means that we're able to communicate in a more how do you say granular level and and make people actually understand what that data says about them what it means for them so that they they need to care or why they should care and I also think that for for for for data to resonate we definitely need to be able to know who our audiences are and sometimes you cannot be using charts all the time or whatever and and coming up with infographics for example it really makes much more sense than looking for stock photography or using just to be able to make people see or even understand what the data is telling us or whatever information that you want to communicate we've been able to use the way we've been able to use data is we've been using data to highlight solutions where they exist and sometimes it would really be an interesting solutions like this particular one where I don't know how many of you know about the motorbike taxis I mean during the pandemic because women were not able some women are not able to access sexual and reproductive health services but they're able to communicate with their health provider but their clinic and then but they can't go or they were not able to travel out or to live their home then the health provider works with a motorbike taxi a dedicated one who then delivers this these goods and services to this to the women and I thought that was quite an interesting situation because who would have thought that you'd have to you could send a motorbike rider to go and collect your your your your your your your products whatever products you want from your clinic from your family planning or SRH clinic we've also been using data to we've been presenting data in an audience friendly way and the reason I use audience friendly because when you look at how data is presented in in some of the international news outlets for example they take into account the understanding of the levels of comprehension or understanding that their audiences may have so we are not dumbing down but we are seriously not going into very intricate and whatever just so that we make a point the beautiful designs are not beautiful if they're not explaining anything or they're not telling me anything or not communicating anything we've also been avoiding terms that are too technical so we use terms that are in common usage they may not be quote unquote uh I use the word quote unquote uh correct English but as the English was speaking so for example care packages in Nigeria known as palliatives and for me palliative means something totally different in Kenya but it was something that everybody in Nigeria knew palliative were the care packages that the government was giving to the most affected the the the destitute and the poor and we also avoid concepts that can be misunderstood a lot of science communication coming from government or even from the scientists themselves is talking about health surveillance in our context especially in Kenya when you say surveillance so already everybody thinks it's the police and you don't want people to be having to misunderstand that health surveillance is not it has nothing to do with the policeman it has nothing to do with the security agencies health surveillance means this so you can't use that word health surveillance you need to think of another word to talk about that so we've also been explaining how data impacts on our audiences by saying okay for example in one instance looking so if you have x number of people who've been affected what does that mean in real terms what does that mean for me so we also work with uh present data in distinctive ways so that people can actually get we get the attention over the communities we've also been using data to debunk claims and I know a lot of you know about all the misleading uh missing the infodemic is the word that has been going on so we've been using data essentially to debunk a lot of claims and we try and do this by not necessarily taking sides and telling people you are wrong you're wrong you're wrong but actually adopting uh how do you call it uh diplomatic way of telling somebody actually what you're saying is not true and this is actually what it is so you don't preach at them you actually have a common persuade them into the truth of what it is that you're debunking because obviously when you tell me I am wrong I'll just become stiff and refuse to listen to what it is that you're telling me about and then we've also found that a lot of people find it difficult to understand standard data presentation format so we've been using obviously telling stories in more engaging ways it's not the usual and actually personalizing humanizing them and one thing that we found is that once we personalize and humanize the the data then people actually can engage so in this instance for example we're talking about the number of women who are not able to undergo fistula operations because of a pandemic that means they continue leaking and all the rest of the madness that goes along with the with the fistula when you have a problem with fistula and one of the things that happened is that the community several communities in Ghana then where especially where these women were leaving got together and decided to at least build them proper facilities and make sure that they have access to water and because you need to keep cleaning yourself up and also a few CSO started engaging with the government to not to to leave the suspension of the fistula operations because they said it's elective I mean fistula operation is not elective Saudi reads it's a matter of life and death dignity and and doom if you want to call it that way so really that was I mean you you need to be able to tell the stories using the data to tell these stories what that means for them and I mean the other thing is also in terms of like the story we did on the blood a lot of people are not thinking about it but we do get a lot most of our blood in our blood banks in most of our countries actually comes from students and because the schools were closed there were no blood drives the blood donor campaigns that tend to happen every month usually targeting school children school I mean secondary school students and university when we closed down the schools and the university meant that we had no way to get those kids not really kids those young adults to contribute or to donate blood which meant that the blood bank is in trouble because we are always under our most of our blood banks don't even have enough blood on other times in other times but now it was quite acute and then you still have the same number of women needing blood because they have they've been bleeding when they're having babies with you know all the needs for blood and especially now with malaria children under five requiring blood so when people when you tell all those the numbers what it means then it's oh really I need to be able to do something about that so we also share obviously what I've said earlier which is actionable information so that people can be able then to make a decision what are we going to do about it and one of the stories we did was about the open air markets and how they are centers of the super spreading I mean they're the super spreader sections of our community because nobody is enforcing the wearing of mask or the hand washing or the basic whatever and that got a lot of attention and I do believe that it it made a difference for me I just want to end by saying one thing generally we have to acknowledge that we don't have I mean we don't have all the data and especially with the pandemic we know it's evolving and things the situation is changing so fast and and and what we know today is now next week will not be will not be the same so we really need to be able to understand that what is important to them may not be important next week but and we need to be able to tell our audience or our readers actually cite the date of the data we are quoting because if I got data of last year this year the situation has changed so if I'm making assumptions or making I'm drawing any kind of conclusions based on data that is dated in the sense that it might be not current then we need to be able to tell our audience that so that they know and understand why that that's on the constraints and why it's not a definite because the situation may have changed by the time that you've actually done that I also want to end by saying that turning messy incomplete and reliable data into credible journalism is a very demanding task and it's also very frustrating I keep on saying frustration yes especially when we have to fight just to get the data access to reliable data so that we can be able to inform people because at the end of the day if citizens don't get the correct information they're not able to get to make informed decisions about issues that actually have a bearing on their lives I mean it's a matter of life and death so yes communicating data is important but we need the data and we need accurate data and reliable data to be able to effectively communicate so I want to end there I'm sorry I've taken too long thank you Federico I'll welcome any questions no problem at all in these cases these are the moments where I don't mind going one or two minutes over time because it's I don't know I'm in awe of your competence and of your of the heart that you put in this so also in that interest I will probably not kind of stop this flow of feelings and content I will keep the questions for later where we all join together and I will basically call on stage first of all thank you all again thank you Catherine again and call on stage Catherine K and while she shows up I will also take a few minutes to also introduce her properly again so again the Q&A is the way to interact with our speakers at best and then also upvoting and the upvoting mechanism is the best way that we can actually make sure that we ask the most wanting questions so our next speaker Catherine Heyho or Catherine K as she kindly allows me to call her she is an in a non-transferric scientist her research is focused on understanding how the climate change actually affects people and the place where they live she's an endowed professor of public policy and law at the Texas Tech University she has been named one of the times one hundred most influential people the United Nations champions of the environment and also what a magical alliance climate ambassador so and I'm kind of asking myself what am I doing here introducing her to this I'm probably here for the same passion that we have about data and communicating that and in all of this she really solemnly guaranteed that she uses R for her daily work even if we won't see a code chunk in her talk today code so a talk for which I'm very much looking forward to so please Catherine the stage is your all yours now thank you so much and that is absolutely true I am an R user I was converted by a statistician and even though people have tried to persuade me to move to math lab or Mathematica I have resisted I still use R please do resist yes I am so my research is based on R the data analysis that I do uses R but what I'm talking about today is I'm actually building on Catherine with the C's talk to talk about not only how data is important but what type of data because sometimes it's not enough we think we've provided everybody with the data that they need to make a good decision and people say ah I don't think so how can we change people's minds well I study climate change which is the most contentious difficult thorny complex issue that there is currently on science so what I'm going to do is I'm going to answer that question focusing on climate data and let me put this into full screen mode here all right I want to start off with just highlighting picking up where Catherine with the C left off how data is very important because in the famous quote everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts and of course the original quote said his but it relates to everyone everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts you can say gravity isn't real but if you step off the cliff you're still going down on climate change the facts are very clear we know that climate is changing humans are responsible scientists agree the impacts are serious and there are solutions now we have known the simple facts of how people are changing climate since scientists from the 1800s yes the data that shows that our planet has a natural blanket of heat trapping gases that keeps us over 30 degrees Celsius warmer than we would be otherwise but by digging up and burning coal and gas and oil we are producing more heat trapping gases that wraps an extra blanket around our planet that we do not need the data proving that and proving that that is why the warm world is warming was collected and analyzed in the 1800s before they had computers let alone are we use are though today to do all kinds of analysis and one analysis we did a few years ago was there are thousands of studies thousands that agree that climate is changing and humans are responsible but in the last 10 years there were 38 studies that found that that was not the case so we took those 38 studies and we reanalyzed every single one of them from scratch using are and what we found was that every single one of those 38 studies had at least one error in it sometimes it would be a mathematical error or calculation error sometimes it would be a false assumption or an important factor that was left out but every single study had at least one error that when corrected brought that study into line with the thousands of other studies that have been published in the last 200 years showing that climate is changing and yes humans are responsible because of the data analysis that scientists have been doing for decades and even centuries it was 1965 when scientists were confident enough that climate was changing humans responsible and the impacts were bad to warn a US president a president was Lyndon B. Johnson and now the headlines look like this expensive wildfires record-breaking heat waves sea ice melting flood losses hurricanes devastating entire islands so people often ask did climate change cause this event and that is not the right question because we've always had hurricane cyclones typhoons droughts floods heatwave storms we've always had those the right question is did climate change make it worse and by analyzing the data we are we can answer that question we can show and this is a brand new headline from yesterday we can show that climate change made the north american heat wave from british clumbia down to california last week 150 times more likely it made the devastating australian brushfire season from january 2020 30 times more likely climate change was responsible for at least 67 billion dollars worth of the damages from hurricane harvey climate change is driving migration crises in many countries including Bangladesh when we analyze the data this is what it shows us so if that's the case why are we not treating it like an emergency right because it is well to understand this we have to go to the social science is not the physical sciences tally shawada is a neuroscientist and she writes in a book that she wrote called the influential mind she says our brains are programmed to get a kick out of information but when we give people new information they typically only accepted if they already believe it if it contradicts what they believe their brain shuts off and she goes on to say the wealth of information available in this internet era makes us more resistant to change because we can just go on the internet and we can find a youtube video about anything that says that we're right i'm paraphrasing here but you get the idea right and even worse as we're exposed to contradicting information and opinions polarization expands with time as people get more and more info dan cahan is a social scientist from yale who studies political polarization and his research was prompted by the fact that for years now climate change has been the most politically polarized issue in the whole us and i'm sorry the width of the gray bars how polarized things are and you can see climate change is right up at the top this was before cofit so what happened after cofit they redid the study last august and here is what they found and this time it's not in the order of the width of the gray bar so i'll point out number three two and one they redid this and now the coronavirus outbreak is the number three most politically polarized issue race and ethnic inequality is a number two and climate change is still number one so dan studies this and he said he found that it has nothing to do with intelligence people with the highest degree of scientific literacy were not most concerned they were the most what polarized and in fact he went on to find and i'll translate this into english being smarter doesn't make you more accepting of the data it just makes you better able to cherry pick the pieces of information that show that you are right now this reaction is not in votes when we're talking about issues that aren't politically polarized like what like dark matter if you give people information on dark matter most people will not and say okay and they won't argue they might not remember it but they won't disagree but on very politically polarized issues which now sadly include cofit and include climate change if people already have an opinion and you showed data that doesn't agree with their opinion they will reject the data rather than rejecting their opinion and this is not only in the united states i know you might be thinking well i'm not in the united states so why is she talking about this they did an analysis across 56 countries and they found that what people think about climate change is not influenced as much by their education and their experience as it is by their ideology their worldview and their political orientation and across 64 countries they found that when people who are politically liberal are more educated they're more concerned about climate change but in wealthy countries where people have big carbon footprints and use a lot of energy if people are more conservative the more information they get about climate change it only makes them a little bit more worried not a lot because political ideology is interfering so what happens is climate changes and we get worried if we follow the data how could we not be worried so often what we do is we simply share more scary data but that just causes people to reject it even more and in action results and climate changes even more as neuroscientists tell us she says she says fear and anxiety causes us to withdraw to freeze to give up rather than take action so this type of data is not moving the needle anymore than it already has how do we break this vicious cycle by sharing the right kind of data what do i mean by that well the real problems we have with climate change is not that we think that 200 years of physics are wrong i mean the same physics that explains why climate is changing explains why airplanes fly and why stoves heat food there's not a lot of people who say that stoves don't actually heat food or airplanes don't fly there's probably one or two and you can probably find them on youtube but in general most people would agree that basic physics is real the real problem we have is we don't think climate change matters to us and we don't think there's anything we can do to fix it to put it another way our threat meter is unbalanced we think the climate solutions are bad and we think the climate impacts are far off and they don't really matter whereas in fact what the data says is climate solutions are good for us short term and long term they clean up our air they give us clean water they create jobs and climate impacts are bad for us and they're right here right now too so how do we address the sense of disconnection well these maps show what it looks like i actually want to give you a picture of what this disconnection looks like across the united states and this is just an example but we do see similar patterns in other rich countries across the u.s most people will say yes climate is changing any thing that is any county here that is orange means more than 50 percent of people said yes and the darker color the more people said yes they asked people will it harm plants and animals a different species and people say yes will it harm oops sorry will it harm future generations yes will it harm people in developing countries yes probably and then they say will it harm you this is the biggest gap we have the gap between people who think that climate is changing and it will affect other species future generations and people who live far away and the people who say it will affect me and if you're wondering about the yellow counties there's some people groups who are more concerned about climate change than others one of the most concerned people groups in the u.s is Hispanic Catholics and another is Native Americans so that's part of what you see there in terms of the pattern what we're looking at is something that is known as psychological distance the idea that a risk of anything a risk of heart disease a risk of not saving enough money for retirement a risk of climate change is distant in time future generations not now distant in space over there not here abstract global average temperature instead of what's happening where I live and irrelevant to things that I care about of course all of these are false climate change is here it is now it is affecting us in very real ways in ways that matter to all of us it is not just about the polar bear it is about us so how can we communicate the data in ways that directly connect with people well captaincy alluded to this it's by telling stories that are what that are here rather than over there that are now rather than the future and that are relevant it turns out neuroscientists have found that when we tell a story people listening to us their brain waves actually synchronize with ours and we're able to empathize with each other rather than only sharing data by itself so for example and this is these are examples of data I work with we can say heavy precipitation has increased across the United States and we can show the percentage increase by region of the United States and we can talk about how it's already happened this is in the past but how much more powerful to connect with people by telling stories of what's happening the midwest flood of spring 2019 here is a farmer whose fields are flooded here is a homeowner who lost their home what's happening in china they're putting up sandbags on the edge of the lake because of the flooding when we make it personal when we make it here when we make it now we engage with that data at an entirely different level than if we're just showing colored areas on a map this one's even worse sea level rise all we have here is some colored lines and they're nice rainbow colors they look attractive they look pretty you think oh sea level rise hmm feet let's see two four six eight well that sounds interesting what does that mean what that means is we have 700 million people living within a few feet of sea level where are they going to go what that means is there is literally ocean water on streets that people are driving through now during high tide plus sea level rise cities are elevating the level of their streets by two feet two feet look at that they're building up the streets to prevent sea level flooding we know that properties the price of properties are dropping and it's people like zillow and real estate companies that are telling us this this brings that data home in a whole different way because we're not talking about meters we're talking about dollars we're talking about feet we're talking about things that are happening where we live here's an even more esoteric one the oceans are warming in units of exodules now i don't think anybody could really identify with that one i mean people would be like what is that why does it matter oceans of course it matters but why it matters because coral reefs are being bleached during marine heat waves it matters because toxic algae is on the rise as oceans warm it matters because hurricanes cyclones and typhoons they're all the same type of storm they're just called different names in different parts of the world they're all powered by warm ocean water and so these hurricanes are getting bigger they're intensifying faster they're getting stronger and slower and they have a lot more rain associated with them and we are able to put numbers on how much worse climate change made it in dollars and maps showing the area flooded in a city that would not have been flooded if the same hurricane had happened 100 years ago that's the type of data that connects directly what about temperature increases i study how different carbon choices on the left lead to different temperature increases on the right but we might think oh one two four degrees celsius that doesn't sound like a lot it doesn't until we start thinking about what that looks like where we live the heat waves that people are enduring literally today record-breaking heat waves leading to massive die-offs in marine life hundreds and even thousands of human deaths all kinds of infrastructure damage crop damage these are relevant and those colored lines on a figure do not convey them in a way that allow people to connect with them but analyzing data at the local scale in ways that matter does and of course wildfires are getting bigger burning more area as well why do we care about climate change we care about it because it affects everything we already care about our water our food our safety our economy our health to care about climate change we literally only have to be one thing and that's a human living on this planet and every single one of us are that it's not about the polar bear on the iceberg yes polar bears are affected but after the polar bear we're next it's humans there on that iceberg so to speak metaphorically we are the ones who are at risk and that is what the data shows very clearly it gets really interesting though circling back to that whole political polarization this is chris too he's a researcher at my university texas tech you can see i like to show you the pictures of people see who they are and he's found that when we talk about climate impacts in a way that is here not over there in a way that is now not the future in a way that is relevant to us that matters that engages with the things we already care about it turns out that that not only decreases psychological distance it decreases political polarization too because we are connecting over something that is important to us that we agree on rather than this than connecting over something we disagree on isn't that amazing but there's one more piece i don't want to stop without this one more piece and that is the fact that many people just feel helpless and paralyzed even when you convince them it matters they don't know what to do in the united states 50 percent of people feel helpless when they think about climate change over 50 percent don't know where to start when it comes to climate action this global survey of countries around the world um feel like i could be doing more or my country could be doing more a lot of people are less than 50 percent they really don't have a sense of what could be done this is a word that social scientists call efficacy efficacy is the idea that if i do something could it make a difference if we do something could it make a difference those people when it comes to climate change would say no i'm not a ceo i'm not a president i'm not a prime minister i'm not an influential person i'm not a rich person i don't think i can make a difference and so that's the last piece of information we need to share because people need to know that as individuals we can make a difference so i like to share information about what all kinds of different people are doing whether it's new technology to show that yes our technology is changing the fact that countries are acting phasing out coal divesting from fossil fuels why not because the prime minister decided to do so at a president because individual people decided and raised their voices and said the world needs to change corporations are changing but why did they change was it because the ceo decided no it was because people who work there decided that it had to change they use their voice within their sphere of influence to say we need to do things differently young people are using their voices and they're changing the world too we know their names we know their fardays for future we know about it because they are using their voices to talk about why this matters the world is changing last year during covid 90 percent of new energy installed around the world was clean energy some of it in some of the poorest places in the world where people don't have access to fossil fuels but if we don't know that this is happening we don't feel like we could ever make a difference and so that's why it's so important when climate changes and when we get worried to break the cycle how rather than dumping more scary data on people break the cycle by showing how it affects us and how there are positive solutions and this creates a true positive feedback loop researchers like Matthew Goldberg have found where the more we know the more concerned we are the more concerned we are the more we talk about it people feel empowered rather than frozen and action results to quote tally sure about one last time our brain is built to associate forward action with reward not avoiding harm so we need to reframe what we talk about so the information we provide induces hope not dread data is important but data alone is not enough we have to think about how to share it what to share and how people respond to that data because only by doing so will we truly be able to communicate what that data contains thank you thank you Catherine that was a roller coaster of the information emotion because I was basically flowing with you on this and I wish you didn't stop now somehow yeah so now it's time to actually ask you something and while our audience might already be start typing some questions in the in the slack lounge or in the q&a I do have one provocative question for both of you I just found a tiny uh genie lamp and you have one wish a small realizable wish that could make a change make an impact in what you do what's your wish let's start with Catherine C you've both muted Catherine's but so if you are you what one wish I have for to do something that could improve what you do on a daily basis it doesn't have to be a two big change or it can be a very big change but something that can really improve what you do I think it's actually been able to access information being able to make it possible to give more than what we just lessen the struggle to get the good information that we can be able to use to communicate with people to let people know what is happening I mean save me the time of having to go from point A to point B to point three just to get one fact you know what I mean because I think it it it takes so much of our energy yet we could be doing so much more and I I think the strain and the stress and the agony of going through this this is what really kills a lot of our ability or it takes our energy out so that's what I would do I mean I'm a bioinformatician totally different corner of science from yours probably but I know the pain of having to access research data and say the upon reasonable request when I see that I kind of get this kind of reaction so I I kind of yeah okay Catherine K what's your wish well I know that if you ever get one wish what you wish is that all your wishes could come true yeah that's a cheap one so I know but I thought about it okay so I mean other than you know an extra hour to the day and things like that I if it's not too big I think that we really need the sustainable development goals they're so basic no hunger no poverty gender equity clean water for people to drink affordable energy if that's too big if we have to go even smaller than that I would say we need a price on carbon because we're producing so much damaging carbon and the pollution just the air pollution alone is responsible for nine million deaths a year let alone climate change I didn't even talk about the air pollution or the health if we just had a price on carbon so that polluters paid the people who are polluting this planet actually paid for what they were doing and that money was used to first of all get them to stop and second of all to help the people who are suffering I think that would be a small very manageable practical first step towards actually fixing this problem okay thank you for making it say small and and manageable as a wish there are already some questions from the q&a so I'll take one from Eva Retamal which asks you where can we learn more about communicating in a way that empowers people goes say let's let's keep the let's keep the catering c the catering c with a c catering with a k order if you if you if you don't mind okay so the question is where you can learn how to communicate data in a way that empowers people yes okay I think I always tell people that Google is your friend and there are quite a number of people who are doing interesting and very very useful work I mean very interesting stuff online but I for as a journalist I always use the data journalism handbook it's quite interesting and not only that one but I actually try and get this understand the concepts of the principles and then apply them within my situation or in your situation because there's no way you're going to get the kind of in terms of data especially if you're doing data journalism for example and you want to be able to communicate it it's not possible to get all but there are some some ways of of of some skills you can learn of online but there are also skills you can learn from going to school maybe if you want to do that communication classes but really I just think break it down to this way I always tell people when I'm writing or when I'm they're writing tell it to your grandmother how would you tell it to your grandmother it's a very esoteric very complicated like Kathy was talking about climate change freezes you or releases you because of how you understand it and and and for me is break it down to simple ways how would you communicate it to your mother or your grandmother and my grandmother not because she's not able to read but she can read but I want to break this very complex thing into something simple then we can have a conversation then it's personalized it's it's not this complex animal out there so you just think about it that way how would you tell it to your grandmother yeah I can why should she care to know to you so the next question I ask you so what after this so what what do you want that to do or what do you want her to feel so think about your messaging and what it is you want them to get out of it and what it is you want them to know and what it is that you want them to feel after even if it's gloom and doom we're all going to die but you are going to die with a smile on your face because that's the thing sorry that's the way I look at it communicating information is you need to connect guys sorry I mean that's true okay I've seen Catherine nicking but say if you want to add something more on this Catherine yes I completely agree so for me I always literally thought about my grandfather how could I tell this to my grandfather and why would he care and why would anyone else care so when we have these conversations and I put a link to my TED talk in the zoom chat and if anybody else is interested you just google my name and Ted and you'll find it I'm in my TED talk I talk a lot about communication and I say the the place to start is not here it's here that's the place to start figure out what the person or people who you're talking to care about like today you notice we're both doing this we all care about data so we're starting by talking about data I have begun conversations about climate change but by talking about food by talking about knitting by talking about the place where I live by talking about the fact that we're both parents by talking about the fact that I love snow so if we can begin a conversation on data with something that connects to people's hearts so then they understand why it matters then step number two connects the dots to the data but then step number three talk about what people can do in response because if you tell people that there's a problem and they don't know what to do about it we tend our human defense mechanism is just to dissociate I mean if I told you an asteroid is hitting the earth and you're not a NASA person you don't work for a Department of Defense there's nothing you can do what are you supposed to do with that information we need to empower people so our data needs to connect to the heart provide the information people need to understand why it matters and then empower them to act perfect yeah I couldn't agree more connected to this somehow we just mentioned how to actually deliver data there is a there is a question from Jesus Castagneto how do we deal with the cherry picking of data and the interpretation bubble when talking to people that we know and interact with this is a question of how to approach the matter or the way the information is conveyed or and dot I continue his dot dot dot so I mean I had a point about internet being a very say way too large resource of information or misinformation is it a bad thing to have or a good thing to have and so how to actually curate this kind of I wouldn't say counter but how to to create this sickness of being able to find data that would support a negationist theory just for the sake of doing it so to make it short how do we deal with that with this actually this is a very huge thing and it can be a very big obstacle to against the work that you do actually let's start with you Catherine see the one thing I know is that you you start off with a hypothesis and then you look for evidence that will either prove your hypothesis to be true or it totally kills your story in the sense that you get evidence or data that tells you no you're not going this way you should be going this way and for me it's to be open-minded to the fact that this is what I think is happening and this is the evidence I'm going to look out for but if I find evidence that is showing me the other side of this thing I need to be open-minded enough to to accept that what I started out with may not be true to be proved wrong because usually we want to be proved right and you you have a deadline as a journalist you have a deadline you have to hit it on the head and then you started off with an interesting hypothesis and you know yeah evidence blah blah blah if I really wanted to be a horrible journalist I'd just go with the evidence that is partially proven but it's not the whole story and I'll be found out anyway and it's human nature like Cathy says to just want to believe what you other people who are like ourselves or whatever but I think the beauty of learning and the beauty of understanding thing is to be able to to push the limits of what we think we know and look at what is coming in which is telling me what I know is not true and then being able to engage with that being open-minded enough to be able to engage with that because at the end of it you'll just be in that bubble of yourself and why the why I keep on saying the internet makes it possible for you to access all manner of information why the hell are you limiting yourself to one in one small portion get everything that is there for you it's free anyway and all it can do for you is broaden your mind and if you still want to insist there's no climate change that's your problem but there's evidence and other information but let it come in let it let let your mind be enriched by whatever is out there not just what it's like what we say unless you travel you don't know there's somebody else who can cook better than your mother so in this case it's the same thing with your mind let all that is there come in it and illuminates what you know and shows you some dark corners of your mind which are totally not they need to be illuminated and given some fresh air sorry as an italian i i hope i respond to your issue yeah but as an italian i hardly believe anyone cooks better than my mother but you need to travel that's why you're talking about travel yes and so human as i have a strong confirmation bias let's say even i i know about that even if i'm not a psychologist what's your point on this catering well i actually have a twitter thread specifically on this question i will post it after we're done so if you just follow me on twitter you'll see my thread there i'll post i'll repost it in 15 minutes or less um but i wanted to share a story about a colleague of my name john cook he's from Queensland in Australia and he had a father every time he went home for dinner his father would say oh john there's more polar bears now than there ever were so how could the planet be warming and he would look up the information he explained to his father how no polar bears really are endangered and he ended up creating a website called skeptical science that lists every single zombie myth about climate change and gives a full scientific answer with citations to all the scientific papers to every one of those 198 myths skeptical science dot com do you think it changed his father's mind no it didn't because it wasn't scientific information that was the problem so john went back to school he got a phd in cognitive psychology he has become the world expert in debunking misinformation and i put a link to his youtube channel in the zoom chat and if you're listening got on zoom google cranky uncle and john cook and it will pop right up and there are amazing videos that he has studied on how to debunk this information and what do you think happened with his father well it turned out that there was a rebate on solar panels in the rural area where his father lived and so john explained to his father how much money he would save if he got the solar panels so his father got them and he saved a lot of money and he started to tell john every month look how much money i saved i'm saving all kinds of money and it made his father even more conservative even more shrewd even more thrifty than he was already so it reinforced his father's identity and a few years later john was talking to his father and his father said oh global warming of course i always thought that was real and john said he almost fell off his chair because not only had his father changed his mind but he had forgotten that he'd ever denied it and did you see my bill this this month look how much money i saved so because he was able to help his father be part of the solution the denial disappeared so rather than addressing the denial directly if we can work around it and help people see how they can be part of the solution often the denial evaporates but there's some people who will never people who are dismissive seven percent of people in the us maybe three or four percent in europe in the uk there's certain people who just won't listen long enough and so for them coco chanel said you know don't try to turn a wall into a door you know if you if you're not going to be able to get through to them don't waste your time on those seven percent so again and my twitter thread explains who those are but for everybody else if we can connect from the heart if we can help people be part of the solution we can often get them to move past the disinformation but if we address the disinformation directly it's like we're playing a game like at the carnival or the fair there's a game called whack-a-mole where it's like a mole pops up and you hit it with a hammer and then as soon as you hit it with the hammer what happens another one pops up and another one another one it's just a whack-a-mole game that never ends if we try to address the disinformation directly i heard it yesterday in a course uh grant me the power to change a thing i can change the extent of strong to accept what i can what i cannot and the wisdom to dissect between the two of them so that's the probably the part that you don't even hear as a third one okay it's probably actually related to this one and also related nicely to a platform such as the art universe but let's call it any open platform that can actually enable data journalists to have an opinion supported with data and allow them to share their written work the figures along with the code so making a full reproducible work out of it and would that probably strengthen the opinion or say let's say the the message that one wants to carry and change the opinion of such person or a small percentage of these this question was asked by kim martin kathryn c so working with journalists to be able to to to to to collaborate with journalists to be able to produce data or to support their narrative storytelling is that a question something like they have misunderstood you maybe no no no it's uh it's it's probably the wish of a platform of an open platform that can basically have i don't know let's let's imagine just like uh like a server of journalism stories that are supported with data where the output that the code and and the input itself are all available i mean we are all familiar of of these things working with art but would something like this second open platform from journalism how strong would that be i paraphrase the question i think it would be really useful because like i mentioned earlier there's a lack in terms of expertise within our newsrooms and journalists themselves don't have that kind of expertise so it would really be helpful to have that kind of collaboration and also being able to to share because i think in terms of what we're producing or the data we are using or the data maybe uh an our user is using or as i has access to or whatever it would really be useful i think it would be a useful thing okay kathryn kei um yes but as as someone commented on the q and a here too i also think it's important to have a platform where people understand and see what's happening how solutions work and positive stories about that and there's actually a really interesting website that's starting to do that called bright action where they allow communities which can be physical communities like a city or they can be communities like virtual communities like the episcopal church of america where all the members of the community can connect and they can talk about what they're doing and what works and what doesn't work and they can track what they're doing and they can add up the cumulative impact of their collective action in terms of reducing their carbon or having conversations or actually accomplishing different specific steps so i i'm a big fan of making data available and there's all kinds of data and numerical data is only one kind of data i would also add two people are commenting i'm not on slack right now but i'm going to go to slack as soon as we're done and answer more questions there so if you put a question on slack and you're looking for more feedback from me you will get it just stay tuned until we're done awesome thank you thank you kathryn there's another question so i basically you pick up on the point of elisa which mentioned about say the power of showing positive solutions way too often we focus on the problem and not giving the hopeful of course it's a scary scenario what we are facing overall might be facing soon so i just hijacked the q&a by asking what else does it still need to happen before people really think that this is happening climate change but also all the issues that are somehow connected to misinformation what happens in africa right now how long does it still have to take before we start believing that these are real things okay i i think when it comes to missing oh sorry kathy why are you going to that's correct can i go okay i was just going to say when it comes to getting the story connecting to the story whether it's climate change or whatever like i say ours is to be able to make people care about what it is that we're reporting on what the issues are and when it comes to me it's information again don't go ahead don't tell me it's a lie i i want to believe you but most likely i'll i'll be i'll be persuaded if you explain to me why why why what i'm thinking is not be diplomatic about it so for me it's literacy what i'd call um i don't want to call it literacy so i'm so patronizing it's actually getting people to understand and to learn how to be able to identify or to to identify what is and what is in good information and why it is bad information it is also being able to explain to people why well okay for example we are facing very cold weather in Nairobi it's extremely it's nine degrees right now nine degrees Celsius we don't do Fahrenheit but i mean it's extremely cold for july even normally we would not be this cold and everybody i need to start we need to i mean telling people what this means why we do not have any more potatoes or the potatoes we are not going to be able to get potatoes or the price has gone up because of blight and it's hot cold so where they grow potatoes the potatoes so you need to break down things into you break down some of these issues and explain to people in ways they understand and break them down and make them personalized and also educate people in learning how to understand the different good things bad things true things not true things slightly true things you know because it's all across the board so they're they're able to do that for themselves because journalists and fact checkers we have too few the m the armies of misinformers are bigger than the army of truth seekers or truth tellers so we will never win so the people consuming the information if you can inoculate them against this by showing them how the same way we are protecting ourselves by wearing masks blah blah blah same thing we should do for misinformation and blood disformation and getting people to understand why i have to wash my hands how to wear a mask all that it's it's common sense i mean it's it's cheap i don't i don't want to call it cheap but it is the most obvious thing to do yeah i don't know why we're not doing it i know but i don't yeah kathleen what's what's your what's your tape and this absolutely i mean john keko i mentioned before he actually literally talks about inoculating people against misinformation and they're teaching critical thinking is one of the most important things we can do actually create a brand new class for my students about critical thinking just teaching them how to evaluate sources so yes the internet is a big place but there is good and there is bad and we need to be able to tell the difference and it's important for all of us to educate our children our students our co-workers people we know to be able to critically think and examine our personal biases like you said our confirmation biases our opinions in the light of data so this has been absolutely amazing thank you everybody and yes i'll answer a few more questions on slack later this afternoon okay great i think we are kind of running out of time and i wish this was not just one hour and a half so i mean we just call to to increase our level of data literacy not just for ourselves but for the people around us i think this is one of the ways that we can really make our work have an impact and for real and for good so without sounding like a preacher in this case i mean it's we this is probably the best and most powerful way that we have in our hands as worker with data that we can use to empower people and make our world a little better so i hate to say this but we probably really have to wrap it here and um yes the best part of it you can still interact with our speakers in the lounge slack and where you can make sure that no questions stays unanswered for this once again i am more than thankful to Catherine C and Catherine K for the time and the insight that we were able to share and next will be a recharge session so i wish all of you a further pleasant use our global thank you thank you