Today, I would like to talk about ICT4E, the back story, ICT4E, meaning Information, Communications, Technology for Education, and this is the back story, a sort of a backgrounder of other sessions that would follow on ICT4E policy and standards. Now the ICT4E discourse is actually based or it's an offshoot of a larger discourse on the information society. Now many of us think that this discourse started very recently, maybe around 10 or 15 or 20 years ago, but actually the information society traces its roots in economics actually. During the 30s, post-depression 30s, we could trace it to three Austrian economists. Friedrich Hayek was the first one. If you Google his name, you will be provided with a link which leads to this information that he's born in Austria-Hungary as Friedrich August von Hayek and he's frequently referred to as F.A. Hayek, an Austrian economist and philosopher best known for his defense of classical liberalism, but actually he was the person who introduced knowledge economics to the discipline, the economics discipline. Now again the backgrounder, consider Germany during the depression, it was being humiliated by the Allies since it lost during the Second World War and it had to pay outrageous reparations to the Allied countries, but then just prior to the war it became one of the top 10 economies. Now how did that happen? Was it because of economic policies of Hitler? No, this fellow, Friedrich Hayek, submitted that it was because of science and technology, it was because of knowledge that Germany earned its place in, well as one of the major economies in the world and one of his associates, Schumpeter, also from Austria, another one of his associates or actually students is a person by the name of Fritz Maklopp. Now Fritz Maklopp emigrated to the United States and at the United States knowledge economics began to be referred to as information economics. Now he was the person who introduced the trichotomy of the agricultural society, the industrial society, the information society, the term information society actually came from him, but it was one of his students, Mark Porat whose 1976 dissertation, a 20 volume dissertation described information of the information economy of the US. During Porat's time he talked about information economics, information-based economies, industrial-based economies, agricultural-based economies. Now how is this related, this concept of information society, how is this related to ICT4E, well as I said the ICT4E discourse is an offshoot of this larger discourse called information society. What makes society an information society, what makes a country an information-based economy? Well according to Porat if the larger number of your workforce are information workers then your country is an information-based economy, it's an information society. If the larger portion of your workforce are agricultural workers or farmers then your country is an agricultural society. Now is the Philippines an information society, well that just happened to be the subject of my dissertation in 1983. Then I found of course given secondary data as well as other sources that the Philippines is an agricultural society, but in 2007 somehow our classification was changed from an agricultural to an industrial to an information society, that is because our overseas Filipino workers were classified as service workers, many of them were put into the category of information workers for one reason or another. Now again what makes an information society, I will show you a graph. Now this graph is called the volatility index, the CBOD or OE volatility index, CBOE meaning the Chicago board of economics if I'm not mistaken. Now this graph shows times when volatility is very high volatility meaning economic markets tend to sell, people have lost trust in their stocks, so they sell their stocks. In this graph you would see peaks in 1987 and 2007 or 2008. Now a large part of that peaking up was due to media coverage of this behavior in the stock market. In 2007 if you're not too young to remember people watched as their people watched CNN or ANC while the value of their stocks fell and as this was being covered by media they started selling selling selling. So this is you know the influence of information and communication in our economy. Another example a more recent one in 15 September 2016 I was on my way to Los Baños along EDSA. I was caught in EDSA traffic and so I switched on the radio. This was at around 10 a.m. and lo and behold the voice that I heard was the voice of Lila de Lima and Edgar Matobato. And the resource person, it was a senate hearing, the resource person was giving out details of a heinous crimes in Davao. And at that time I was checking the Philippine Stock Exchange Index on my phone. So this is a picture of the Philippine Stock Exchange Index at 10 to 1030. Now at around 10 the witness was giving his testimony and at that time the PSE index dropped drastically. Okay now at around 1030 he was interpolated by Senator Tito Soto and at that time when Tito Soto started putting or was punching holes into his testimonies it was the stock index was going higher. It went a bit higher and then de Lima interjected and served as a lawyer to the witness. Again it went down. Now immediately after that I got home, I watched TV and then also monitored the PSE index on my phone and this is the image that I got. Okay now if you look closely the ebbs and flows, the speaking and diving of our index coincides with interpolations of Senator Sandy Angara and Senator Cayetano actually ending with Cayetano's interpolation after his questioning the witness the index was at the same level as it was before 10. So you could just imagine how coverage, how media coverage, how information and communication could actually dictate the value of your stocks. Such is an information society, how is this relevant to us in the education sector. Now one of the foundations, one of the found or the basic assumptions of the information society discourse is that information is a commodity that has value. It should be factored into our economic equations. Information is something that can be sold or bought. Counterpoint to that is the open access movement. Now what you see is the universal symbol for open access. How does it look like? It looks like a padlock doesn't it? Okay an open padlock with an O in the middle and an A so that's for open access. Open access submits that information is free, knowledge is free. It should be accessible to all its users. Now along that comes the open educational resources along the same line. This is what is known as the creative commons stamp. The universal symbol for creative commons. If you have copyright then you would have copy left. Within the information society discourse is the concept of openness in sharing knowledge and what you see now is the coat of arms of the open university which refers to the UK open university. Note that its motto is learn and live. In 2011 a ranking was made to determine the top 10 research universities at the UK and according to Sir John Daniel the UK open university was fifth in that rank. Number one was Cambridge. Number three was the London School of Economics. The fifth was the UK open university. It outranked even Oxford which was number six. And this open university actually is becoming a trend. What you see is the seal of the University of Michigan. The University of Michigan or the University of the Philippines has its open university and they call their open university open Michigan. So perhaps we should call ourselves open Philippines or open UP. There is also this Nottingham University has its open Nottingham. Now these trends are all offshoots of information society. You must have heard of the concept of mega universities. A mega university is a university with a minimum of 100,000 actively enrolled students. This term was again coined by Sir John Daniel in 1995. Only 11 such institutions existed. By 2011 there were almost 50 mega universities worldwide. And an example of a mega university is the University of Phoenix in Phoenix Arizona. Perhaps or arguably the most successful open university in the United States. And of course we have our UP Open University. It's the fifth constituent unit of the University of the Philippines system. It's UP Cyber Campus. And we believe strongly that we pioneered an ICT for education. We established a Faculty of Information and Communication Studies in 2004. And 100% of our courses are offered online. Also as educators we should be aware of what is known as the Paris message. In 2015 49 countries converged in Paris to deliver this so-called Paris message to agree first and then deliver. Part of the Paris message reads we call on governments to recognize the important contribution of online open and flexible systems to meet the challenge of scale and quality in the provision of higher education and lifelong learning for the period 2015 to 2030. Consider that this was the Paris message was drafted the same month as the release of the Sustainable Development Goals 2015-2030 which has one of its major goal lifelong learning and education for all. The countries who participated in drafting the Paris message believed that higher educational institutions will not be able to accommodate the uptake of college enrollees by 2030 or even the years towards 2030. There will be a deficit of something like 30 million up or students who would want to take college they will not be able there or educational institutions will not be able to accommodate them because of the lack of facilities the lack of space and this is the reason why we have to go online we need to explore or mainstream online open and flexible systems. Yes ICT is an offshoot of the information society ICT meaning information and communication it's either say communications technology or information and communications technologies okay it's a new generation of technologies brought about by the merger of computers and telecommunications okay internet the worldwide web and so on multimedia. Now in the late 90s somebody felt that it should be applied for the development agenda and so we have ICT4D meaning information and communication technology for development this was this movement originated in the world bank and eventually UN agencies adopted it such as UNESCO and UNESCO and as a sub category or sub field under ICT4D ICT4E information and communication technology for education in the Philippines the pioneering institution that went into this is fit ed now the UP Open University was quite fortunate that two of the fit ed's thought leaders in the early part of the 21st century were actually part of our faculty I'm referring of course to Dr. Laudit Supplido who introduced e-learning to UPOU and Dr. Pat Arinto who is now the Dean of the Faculty of Education okay at around the same time the CICT was established by the Philippine government now how did ICT4E get into the Philippine education scene since the time of fit ed and CICT among the intentions of the basic education sector reform agenda in 2006 was to develop an ICT4E strategy for the Philippines and there were a number of studies that were conducted that led to this ICT4E strategy some of which assumed these propositions that ICT4E programs in the Philippines during that time tended to be technology driven and ICT4E programs tended to be donor driven and social realities necessitate the appropriate use of ICTs for education okay then ICT4E had three functional areas ICT for pedagogy okay there was a depth ed computerization program the DTI PCs for public schools project I schools e-school community e-centers okay the ASEAN school net consider this was from the period of 2004 to 2007 the APEC ICT model school project and so on and so forth there was systematic exploration of the feasibility of e-learning for basic ed which was yet to be initiated the next functional area was ICT for teacher development okay there was the CHED initiative on standards for ICT teacher competencies I think which is part of this program that is developing this open educational resource Intel's teach to the future pit eds instructional design workshops etc etc okay the third functional area is ICT for governance and management okay depth ed then had a number of databases the basic education information system and others okay now there were structural issues then depth ed had no organizational readiness the current organizational structure of depth ed may not be very conducive to networking information and communication flows were stymied instead of flowing freely horizontally vertically and radially I understand that nowadays there's a move to improve this the internal communications within depth ed and the symptom was that there were too many channels for too much paperwork the organizational culture of the department was possibly averse to knowledge sharing and reuse there were also political issues such as interfacing and coordination among the different bureaus one project would develop its own database another project would develop its own database and these database do not communicate with one another they cannot exchange data they cannot merge data they're also programmatic issues there is very little appreciation of primary secondary and tertiary impacts of ICTs in the development development setting what determines current ICT program design it's actually assessment needs or donor agendas it's based on social agendas or technologies the relevance and sustainability would be enhanced if impetus for the project came from a real and felt need the conclusion of these different studies then among these studies were one which was funded by CIDS the Center for Integrative and Development Studies is that in spite of clear visioning among ICT4E advocates programs tend to be insensitive to social realities because of the lack of proper appreciation of higher order impacts of ICTs donor agency country agendas industry agendas structural issues within depth ed and there were a number of policy instruments that were introduced or proposed the first one was defining the coverage of ICT to include traditional media not only those where computers and telecommunications merge another policy instrument was an appropriate use policy okay the rationale of which was that with the adoption of the above definition what follows is an appropriate use policy that sets efficient and effective utilization guidelines the next policy instrument that was proposed then was donor coordination and harmonization and public private sector partnerships now all of these studies these policy options all contributed to an ICT4E strategy of the department of education which will be one of the topics in a future session okay so I will end with my favorite poem you know or stances from a very old poem endless invention endless experiment brings knowledge of motion but not of stillness knowledge of speech but not of silence knowledge of words and ignorance of the word or all our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance all our ignorance brings us nearer to death but nearness to death no nearer to god where is the life we have lost in living where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge where is the knowledge we have lost in information the cycles of heaven in 20 centuries brings us nearer or father from god and nearer to the dust tsl yet a poem which he wrote in the 1934 the rock okay where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge where is the knowledge we have lost in information we hope that the educational sector will not be asking these questions to itself thank you very much


Why are you taking photos for beauty? Yes, I'll save your photos here.  Yeah, of course. My head even spinning up to now. It's not crazy. So what happened today was, me coming to Zambia, I really never knew that Zambia was this beautiful because anytime I hear about Zambia, it's about safari and the rest. So when I told him to take me to the city center, I was blown away. And then we went there and then we started like walking in the city center with cameras started. I think you left us. Yeah, I was parking the car. So I was like, I wanted to follow you guys.  So we were arrested while we had our camera in our hands. We were trying to check out how beautiful the city is but you know, we were mocked. This one guy who came to us and he said, why are you filming? Do you know that this place is there? They came so aggressive. So aggressive. And then all of a sudden we were surrounded by so many people. Exactly. Okay, let me say the truth. To us here in Zambia, we are peaceful people. But we have such people, bad people like him because what we were doing, it wasn't a wrong thing. Because we were not shooting him. We were not shooting people. We were just shooting the building and how beautiful. How beautiful the streets are. And that thing, it will also help us more because when you people, you subscribers watch how beautiful Zambia is, they might even come. Because we never, there is no bad thing what we have so today. Exactly. So for me it's my first time to be here in Zambia and I was also fascinated that some streets in Zambia they look the same even almost the same. They look the same as Nairobi CBD in Kenya. In Kenya. How the streets is, how people are selling. So even when we were arrested we were actually talking about that moment, that moment we were talking about. Because I've been to Kenya and I saw and I was like, wow, this is like CBD Kenya. And he's like, yeah, he's even surprised. And then this guy came to us, a lot of people surrounded us. They asked, where are you from? I said I'm from Ghana. Two grown up men with white beard and gray hair. You know, gray hair. Said, oh Ghana, criminal, you are Nigerians. And trust me, that same person who said the same word, they are not even a Zambian because Zambian people, they don't insult people. No, they don't. No, they can't say they are not. Maybe you are a Zambian, that's why you don't want to say that. No, no, I'm not defending Zambia. No, listen. Because the same person who was there, he cannot look at the way when we went to the police people. The way they helped us. They were like, no, what do we arrest? I'm not defending because of Zambia. But that man, if I follow him right now or ask him to be honest, it's not to do with Zambia. Because Zambian people, they don't insult, they don't. Maybe you fight, then you joke. It was so crazy. Like you said, they are criminals. They can be terrorists. We were handled like terrorists. You were handled like terrorists. You were not there. We were handled like terrorists. The guy took the whole cameras from us. A lot of people surrounded us. Even took our passports. They took our passports. And they said, where are the security men? Over here. And they called security men for us. And then the security men came. I think they called first the military. Was it the military? No, no, that's the police. That's the police, normal police. The first one. The first only saw those guys when I entered the office. One was wearing green. Those are not police. Those are just normal police. The military, they wear such a color like these ears. They don't wear that one. And the military, they don't found in town. They was out of town. But okay, to be honest, let me say the truth to your family. We apologize. We have what happened. You saw it. Yeah, I was there. I was suffered with you. It was one o'clock. Was it one? Before one. We stayed there, so... Almost like 4 hours. 4 to 5 hours we were fighting. And they took us to the bank. And the bank doesn't even want to hear anything. Even the time you called me, the time he called me, I asked him, what are you wearing? He was like, I'm not going to wear it. I said, yo, I'm not going to run away. Why would I run? If I want to run away, I wouldn't code you. Yeah. Then when I reached there, he hold me. He was like, excuse me, don't hold my hand like this. I'm not a criminal. So can you take me to the office and explain what happened to him? This man, he claimed to be a journalist. And he's not. He didn't prove himself. Because as a journalist, you should have certified documents. Exactly. That you are a journalist. You should have what do you call it, license. Uh-huh. To be a journalist. You know, I've been arrested in so many countries. But sometimes it happened in a quick way. But this was just... I felt like it's even sad to call yourself an African sometimes. Because this guy, immediately he had... I told him that I'm from Ghana. It's all Ghana and Nigeria criminals. You know, we went there into the bank. The security... The main security boss at the bank, immediately I said, oh, Ghana and Nigeria.  Imagine. Imagine. And they're older people. People who have white hair. How can you say that the entire Ganyans and Nigerians are like that? It was like, listen to me. I felt so bad to call myself African at that very moment. Because they didn't even want to hear us talk. And all the time it was that guy talking, talking, talking. They said, no, go to the room. They put us in a small room. The room that you came in. That's the same room. That's the same room. They put us in that room. We can't use our phones. We can't even talk to you. So that's why they were calling you. And they called you to talk to us. See, that guy doesn't even know them. He's like, what? How come? He just wanted to make the situation in big. Okay, let me say the truth. You know, sometimes don't give up that in Africa. No, but they didn't treat us Africans. But whatever you go to any countries, you find such bad people. Exactly. So what I'm trying to say is that treating ourselves like this, if I meet a zombie in Ghana and I want to do the same thing to him, definitely because of my experience in your country. You get what I mean? Because even from there they said they should take us to the police station. When you went to the police station, those people refused to talk to us because they said this is the big case. So they took us to the central police. And they took us to another police station. That's the biggest. And I want to say thank you so much to the officer. If you are watching this video, the officer who handled the case perfectly, he saw the videos and he's like, I don't see anything wrong with this video. And when he was talking to me, one of my subscribers, YouTube subscribers, actually came in and was like, oh, what am I? And everything like, solved everything over there. What happened? I felt so bad. Hours, spending hours thinking that this morning I'm a terrorist criminal because I'm from Ghana, Nigeria. Okay, don't think. Even when I called Lilia Muatawa, she was like, the first thing she told me was try to solve things in a other way. That person, he's jealous to be honest because the time we looked at him, because right now he didn't even got any benefit. He didn't get anything. And he wasted like 4 hours. He was busy talking. Talking to everyone. Moving from police to another police because we were not even wrong. And the funny thing is, when we went to the central police and the police man told him that we did nothing wrong. He felt ashamed and he went away. He ran away. He even wasted that police man's time. Exactly. And the other police came like, oh my god, what happened? They were so crazy. I wish you guys can see what really happened. By telling them, they would be easy. They would never even understand. It was super crazy. Again, it was hot and with the traffic jam where we were moving from side to another. But being treated as a terrorist in your own country and you yourself are innocent and you're trying to show the beauty of Africa, the beauty of Zambia and if someone sees you like this because that person who took our cameras first of all, it's not a police man. It's a normal season. Actually, I wasn't there. If I was there, I wouldn't even allow him to touch you. It was not only one person. Crowd of people. Crowd of people, when they started calling us criminals, they can be terrorists, a lot of people mocked us. So two people took our camera and took us inside the bank that we are taking and we are not even taking that, we are just walking. So he saw us with the camera and he said, what are you doing with the camera and all of a sudden something like this happened. It was crazy. The time we were calling you, they didn't want us to talk to you because they think maybe you can be the other spy who is coming too. See, that's what the guy said. I wouldn't tell you. The clod up. Exactly. I was surprised like, yo, if I want to run, I wouldn't even call you. What would I do with that? It's been crazy man but like I said, I'm not going to give up on showing the real part of Africa that I don't show on TV. Yes, today has been crazy but tomorrow I'll still hit the street because I'm not giving up on this project. The good thing when you want, you have to suffer for it. Exactly. Because look at right now, this is not your first time to be arrested. Actually today we didn't even arrest it. It was just talking and fighting. Yes, but still look at how you are right now, you are very far. So what I would advise you keep it up and that policeman, I wish I would have seen him again. He helped us a lot. Thank you so much. So yeah, he handled the case very professionally and told the guy to leave and then told us to go away. So hey, Zambian, I'm not going to say anything again but trust me, you're going to see beautiful footages from your boy Mr. Moe. I'm actually surprised in here, the beauty that I'm seeing because personally, I thought Zambia would be like, you know, going to see lions everywhere. No actually, you haven't even seen the beauty of Zambia. Like the roads which I've shown you, that's not even beauty. There are more. If today we had more time, we would have gone to all those places. Yes, but now the problem, he stepped our program because what I was thinking from there, I wanted to take you another place to see how pure it is. No problem. So we are... Like Zambia, it actually took me back home. When I was looking in the Zambian streets, in the town, it actually took me back to Nairobi. I felt like I was in Nairobi city. It feels so nice to be, I had a very long time, I really felt nice. So you are welcome and let me apologize on behalf of everyone. It's alright. Thank you so much for your time, your beautiful time that you have given us. We really appreciate it. We are together. We are still together. Until I don't know when you are going. Yeah, it's alright man. Zambia, it's good to be here. It's good to be home. Okay. So if you see any conflict, please make sure that you comment. You told us what's wrong with us. Of your terrorist. It's okay. We have a good course to promote the country, the continent, and stay tuned for more videos. And make sure you subscribe and like it and share please so that everyone watches how beautiful we are. Thank you. Peace out.


heavily on your curveball tonight. What went into that decision? Just seeing their swings. Had had a lot of a lot of bad swings on it, especially in the dirt and it's pretty safe pitch when they're swinging at it, because I'm just so far out of the zone. So kind of just went to that whenever I had the opportunity and tried to stay in as many counts as I could. Is that the best your curveball has been this year? Yeah, yeah. How personally satisfying is this start considering the white socks and that lineup and what they typically do to left handed pitching? Yeah, I mean, that's that's more of what I expect out of myself. Go out there, give us set the tone, give our team a chance and we won a game, so. It was a fun one tonight. Kluber had the no hitter. Herman followed up with seven scoreless. You follow up with seven scoreless. How much is this rotation feeding off of each other right now? Yeah, yeah, I mean we're each going out there and. Given the team a chance to win and going deep, so we're just going to keep doing it. Keep rolling and no one's going to be the one to want to finish it. And what are you thinking? When you see Chapman get out of the ninth inning the way he did? I've never seen a triple play before. Especially one where the third baseman is not like right on the bag. So the fact that Geo took two steps. Still on the bag.


Sub everybody forced here ripping a box of 21 22 select basketball hobby for Christopher L Thank You Christopher here. We go man This Ryuji Mowgli concourses start Concourse try color rookie Chris Duarte be not number another Duarte a Kyle Coosma concourse white Coos 99 of 149 silver concourse on the depot Josh kitty courtside rookie base It's got a Barnes concourse rookie got a die-cut coming up Davion Mitchell to 249 rookie premier level blue Solid Davion there Jalen Johnson a buddy healed 107 of 299 concourse light blue Carl Anthony Towns game-worn Jersey card non-numbered premier level silver Paul George Silver concourse Bogdanovitch giddy concourse Try color concourse rookie Kai Jones Luca premier level to backwards cards here. Okay. All right. Okay. You've got an artist Gilmore in a flight neon auto number 53 of 99 James Harden premier level maroon 78 of 175 Rhymes All right last three packs. He's on the big here Tray Murphy the third Moses moody concourse silver Nicola Vusevich courtside John Marant shingoon a Gold patch auto buddy healed 10 out of 10 game-worn patch auto buddy healed There you go Christopher. That's a nice looking car. They'll love that throwback Kings patch actually The three colors Here's got premier level try color rookie Franz Wagner. There you go. Thank you Christopher. We appreciate it We'll get these right out to you


Motivated reasoning is reasoning based upon subjective motives that condition the cognitive processes of the individual towards generating conclusions that endorse the maintenance or attainment of the subjective motives of the individual. As such, motivated reasoning is characterised by rationalisation, a phenomena where the outcome to the process of reasoning is predetermined and reasoning is used as a means to give conceptual validation to the predetermined outcome, which is the inverse of the proper process of reasoning. Neural science research concludes that motivated reasoning is qualitatively distinct from objective reasoning, that is instances when there is no strong emotional stake in the outcome. Motivated reasoning is closely associated with emotional reasoning, which is a cognitive process by which a person concludes that their emotional reaction proves something as valid regardless of the observed evidence or other people's reasoning. Processes of motivated reasoning are a type of inferred justification strategy, which is typically used to mitigate cognitive dissonance. When people form and cling to false beliefs despite overwhelming evidence, the phenomena is labelled motivated reasoning. In other words, rather than searching rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe. This is a form of implicit emotional regulation in which the brain moves quickly to converge on judgments that minimise cognitive dissonance. The outcomes of motivated reasoning derive from a biased set of cognitive processes, that is strategies for accessing, constructing and evaluating beliefs. The motivation to be accurate enhances the use of those reasoning processes that are considered most appropriate, whereas the motivation to arrive at particular conclusions enhances use of those that are considered most likely to yield the desired conclusion. An example of motivated reasoning may be seen in the psychological mechanisms people commonly use to preserve a favourable identity of themselves. In order to maintain a positive regard for themselves, people unconsciously discount unflattering information that contradicts their self-image or is otherwise troubling to them. The same can be seen in whole populations of people where a nation may selectively construct its history emitting unfavourable elements that are otherwise widely considered historical facts. The common feature of all motivated reasoning is that the outcome is predetermined and thus the process of reasoning is essentially just a process of searching for evidence and reasons to support the predetermined outcome which is called rationalisation. This can be seen as an inversion of the normal conception of objective reasoning where all relevant evidence is gathered, synthesised and thought through to create conclusions. With motivated reasoning however, the outcome is predetermined and the process simply used to present a rational argument to others and oneself. Social science research suggests that reasoning away contradictions is psychologically easier than revising our feelings. In this sense, emotions are shown to colour how facts are perceived. Feelings come first to define preconceptions and evidence is used mostly in service of those preconceptions. Evidence that supports what is already believed is accepted, that which contradicts it is excluded in various ways. Motivated reasoning defines a situation where the individual cannot accept the outcomes to a process conducted through the use of objective reasoning and may develop elaborate rationalisations to justify holding beliefs that logic and evidence have shown to be wrong. Motivated reasoning involves building models based upon subjective motives and trying to make the objective reality then fit into those models. Evidence disproving the preconception is systematically denigrated through a number of psychological mechanisms such as biased information searching, biased information assimilation or disconfirmation bias. Biased information searching is a phenomenon where the individual actively searches for evidence that supports the preferred belief or discredits any information not consistent with the desired outcome. Biased information assimilation is exposing oneself to sources that will systematically support one's preconceptions. For example a person reading a certain politically or ideologically motivated news source which supports their preconceptions. Disconfirmation bias refers to the tendency for people to extend critical scrutiny to information which contradicts their prior beliefs and accept uncritically information that is congruent with their desired beliefs. Similarly another form of cognitive bias used in motivated reasoning may be motivated skepticism which is the practice of an individual applying more skepticism to claims that contradict their preconception than to claims that support them. The view of motivation as a means to reducing cognitive dissonance within the individual has long since been held by social scientists. Dissonance is a theory of human motivation that asserts that it is psychologically undesirable for individuals to hold manifestly contradictory beliefs, ideas or opinions. The theory holds that this dissonance causes stress that is unpleasant to the individual which then motivates a person to change their cognition, attitude or behaviour so that they conform to each other and thus reduce the dissonance. The theory was first explored in detail by the social psychologist Leon Festinger. Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance focuses on how humans strive for internal consistency. An individual who experiences inconsistency, what we call dissonance, tends to become psychologically uncomfortable and is motivated to try and reduce this dissonance as well as actively avoid situations and information likely to increase it. Two opinions or beliefs or items of knowledge are dissonant with each other if they do not fit together that is if they are inconsistent or if one does not follow from the other. For example a cigarette smoker who believes that smoking is bad for her health has an opinion that is dissonant with the knowledge that she is continuing to smoke. In this situation the person is both addicted to the substance and does not want to give it up. Likewise they do not want to experience the dissonance between the evidence about smoking related to health issues and their actions. The outcome to this is that the person may use various cognitive bias talked about before to avoid the evidence or at least downplay it. In such a circumstance the person is using motivated reasoning to reduce cognitive dissonance and continue to experience the desired physiological state induced by smoking and avoid the undesirable physiological state of having to quit smoking. In such a case the individual's reasoning process is becoming subordinate to their desired conclusion so that they don't have to change their behaviour. Their reasoning becomes distorted so as to avoid the physiological or psychological stress of change. A 2004 article in the journal Cognitive Neural Science entitled Neural Basis of Motivated Reasoning highlighted some of the underlining neurological workings to motivated reasoning. The study presented findings from functional neuroimaging of the neural responses of 30 committed partisans during the US presidential election of 2004. The researchers presented subjects with reasoning tasks involving judgments about information threatening to their own candidate, the opposite candidate or neutral control targets. Motivated reasoning was associated with activities of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, anterior singular cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, insular cortex and lateral orbital cortex. As predicted the study found motivated reasoning was not associated with neural activity in regions previously linked to cold reasoning tasks and explicitly conscious emotional regulation. The findings provided the first neuroimaging evidence for phenomena ferocity described as motivated reasoning, implicit emotional regulation and psychological defence. The researchers suggested that motivated reasoning is qualitatively distinct from reasoning when people do not have a strong emotional state in the conclusions reached.


It's finally all signed up and ready to go that puts a smile on the face of manager Aaron Boone a lot of things do But getting a guy a quality ace like him is that you you were impressed with four and a half hours of meeting with him We just got impressed by some of the things that he said and one thing that Jack and I asked him about and he said was Was it pressure is a privilege and you earn that privilege? You I gotta think you want to hear every one of your players saying that no question You know, I think you guys got a little little peek at what well We got to experience for several hours where we're really Garrett kind of drove the meeting and it was a great I thought forum to where we really got to know each other Got to see what makes him tick and his his Acute understanding of who he is as a person as a player Why he's good how to apply himself kind of how he's evolved now over the years And the ability to really articulate it and speak to it and the kind of questions he was asking that He was interested in within our organization You walked away going this is a special guy and Obviously between line speak for itself, but we feel like we have another special person We're bringing into our clubhouse Aaron when you did walk away from that meeting How confident were you that this guy is going to be a Yankee in 2020? I Don't know. I mean all I'd say is that the meeting I thought went really well You know Where that goes and where the negotiations would go from there? Because we hadn't even started the negotiations So you never know that and you you know, you never know truly what's going on inside of someone But certainly felt good about the meeting felt good about You know the way each side I felt like got to know each other So was certainly hopeful but but truly a great unknown I gotta think with the contract now signed you're thinking ahead, right spring training first bullpen session Could be a lot of people I think you're gonna be front and center probably watching the pop of the myth there, right? Yeah, no question and it's great having Matt Blake here our new pitching coach and You know, they're gonna start to obviously really connect and and obviously he's really excited to to Have a have a picture the addition of of Garrett so Yeah, I mean, you know I guess now we're you know less than two months away from pitchers and catchers and And all the planning that goes in in the offseason to put ourselves in a position to to hit the ground running when we get down there This is an important time But today's the time to celebrate a great player joining our family. This is a long-term marriage I'm going to ask you the same question. I asked Garrett What has to happen across these next nine years for both sides to have felt this was a successful and a productive marriage? Look, obviously we all look in this and especially here with the Yankees, you know, we want to win championships and You know, it's been a while since we've won We feel like we have a club that's Been been very close here these last few years knocking on the door guys that have kind of have that What I believe is championship medal championship and tangibles and that'll be the focus and We've brought in a guy and Garrett cold that is about winning and that's what he wants to be a part of so That's the focus. It's it's how can we be at our best and along the way We know there's gonna be ups and downs and peaks and valleys and we embrace all those things you embrace all those adverse things that come up But hopefully in the end it's it's it's incredibly fruitful for him and for us and for everything We're hearing about him. He is really matured in that way You talked about maybe in the past there were times if he didn't get a call He might get a little frazzled. He seems to channel that in a much different way Yeah, you know in kind of watching his career unfold and you know, I watched him pretty closely when he was in Pittsburgh when I was You know on your side of things In a lot of ways it really does mirror CC's career in a lot of ways I had the opportunity to play with CC in Cleveland where he was a great pitcher from a very young age But at times I felt like you know, his emotions would sometimes get the best of them And and I saw the maturation of CC over the years where where he Struck that balance between being this amazing competitor, but having Really come a really great command of his emotions, which I feel like is so important for a starting pitcher I feel like it's a similar way with Garrett obviously great success with Pittsburgh and as a young pitcher But sometimes you'd see that emotion. Maybe at times get the best of them We're seeing a guy that's really mature. That's an intense Fiery competitor, but really in command of his emotions. I'm glad you mentioned the transition from Pittsburgh to Houston He starts throwing more four seamers fewer two seamers the breaking pitches seem sharper This almost seems blasphemous to ask but is there another level for this guy? Well, we hope so and I would I would put nothing past Garrett I mean, this is a great athlete a guy that's in in tremendous shape I think his intelligence has allowed him to continue to evolve and to continue to get better and when you combine Intelligence work ethic the ability to apply things to a great talent and a great delivery I think his expectation is to always continue to improve and hopefully we alongside of them can can Contribute to that great things coming up


Heparanase II, HPSE-2, a structural homologue of Heparanase I, HPSE-1, is a promising candidate for treating glomerular diseases due to its lack of enzymatic activity. Inflammation and diabetes can cause down-regulation of HPSE-2 expression, which is reversed when HPSE-1 is inhibited or when HPSE-2 is administered. This suggests that HPSE-2 may have a protective role in glomerular diseases. Furthermore, HPSE-2 protein and a mixture of three most potent HPSE-1 inhibitory HPSE-2 peptides were able to prevent LPS and streptozodicin-induced kidney injury. These findings suggest that HPSE-2 may be a promising therapeutic agent for treating glomerular diseases. This article was authored by Barranca Bidgers, Marjaleen Garson, Mark DeGraw, and others.


The United Nations Saturday was deeply content by developing the human rights situation in Senegal and sees a dark precedent in the use of firearms by security forces against demonstrators. From June 1 to 3, Senegal was in the grip of its worst unrest in years following the sentencing of opposition politician Usman Sonko to two years' imprisonment in a vice scandal. The announcement of the sentence triggered violence that officially left 16 people dead, but Amnesty International puts the death toll at 23. As it stands, Mr. Sonko, a popular figure among young people and underprivileged, can no longer roam for precedency. He cries conspiracy to eliminate him politically. So you get notified about fresh news updates.


Hey coach, welcome back to the podcast. My name is Ben Neighbors, I'm the founder here at buildmysportsbiz.com.  This comes from one of our clients. His name is Coach David. Now what I want to do is back up a little bit. At the very beginning, when David came to me, this was many years ago when we first started this YouTube channel. He saw a couple of our videos and he reached out to me. And I will never forget my first phone call with David. We talked for about an hour. He absolutely hated his job at the time. And he told me that he wanted to fly down to San Antonio to learn from me for a couple of days. And that's what he did. He invested not only time but money. He flew down here from, he lives in San Diego, California. He flew down here, we spent three days together here in my office. And what I realized with David was because he hated his job so much, he had that much more reason to start his business. He really wanted to go after this industry of training kids within soccer. And when he started, there's three things that he lacked. Number one, he had no network. It wasn't like when he started his business, a bunch of other parents and kids already knew who he was. He started literally from scratch, the same way I started. And that's why when he came into Texas to meet with me, I told him how I started from ground zero. Not knowing anyone to start to get a couple of clients, start to have a good base of clients and then from there he could grow. But that's how he started. He knew nobody. This meant too, it took him time to go meet with parents. It took him time to get in front of more kids. He's been in this business now, I think for over three and a half years now, but he started from scratch, zero network. The other thing he really lacked is he didn't know how to sell anything. And I'm saying that as nice as I can. And I was the same way too. When I started my business, I didn't know how to sell. When David started, he needed a lot of help with how should he present his program to parents? How much is it? What's the value that he's offering? How should he structure his conversation with these parents? And Coach David was one of the first coaches who went through the script that I've created for our consulting program. And he has gone through that and dissected it. And I will tell you now, out of any coach that I've ever consulted with, he right now is the best at selling. He started from scratch. He was super nervous over the phone. I remember he would record some of his conversations and send them to me. And I would listen back to those and I would coach him on it. And I can tell you for a fact, at the beginning, he hated talking to parents because he was uncomfortable with the process of selling. But because he mastered that, he was able to go from, you know, I would say a couple of clients charging a very low amount per session to now he has a program set up that's $800 a month for 12-month commitment for private training. And I know most coaches who hear what I just said, they're going to be like, yeah, right, there's no way. I can assure you right now he has that. He's selling it. And he has happy clients who are participating in this program. And that's not because he just lives in some rich part of the US. It's because he has a high value on his program. And I'll tell you, his program is one of the best programs in the United States as far as soccer goes. He has the most value. The kids are getting great results. There's kids who are training there, going off to playing college and stuff like that. And it's worth it for parents. The investment is worth it based on the value that they're getting, OK? And lastly, David hated doing videos. He hated marketing himself. This is a common problem for a lot of coaches at the beginning of their business. They don't know what types of videos to shoot. They don't know how long those should be. They don't know what to say in those videos. And piece by piece, I helped David put out his first video, which he got a great response on. Then he stayed consistent with that. Then he started learning copywriting, which is how to write better emails, how to persuade parents through emails. These are all things I've talked about on videos on this channel. But what David did is he took action. He didn't just learn from me and just sit there. He learned and he implemented. And because of that, now, David's shooting info products. He's selling digital programs to parents that don't even live in his area because he's able to take all the skills that he's learned. He took the no network skill. He learned how to market himself. He didn't know how to sell. So he started to really learn that and master it. And then with social media and with any marketing, he has really taken that to a much higher level than I would say most coaches out there, even coaches who've been in business for 10 to 15 years. And I wanted to share the story with you because I need to show you an example of someone who started from zero. He wasn't running Facebook ads. He wasn't doing anything special or ordinary. He started from scratch and grew his business significantly to the point where, yes, he can do this full time. He's doing very well full time. And I know if you're in a position, if you're a coach that is starting or maybe you have a couple of clients and you want to get to the next level, what I want you to do is on the screen, you're going to see my phone number. I want you to quickly just shoot me a text there. This way you and I can get in contact together. And what I would love to do is schedule a 15 to 20 minute phone call with you to see how I can help you out. This call is free. I'm not going to push anything on you. I want to just chat with you and I want to learn to see where you're at right now and where you want to go. And I can assure you, if you've solved David's testimonial, you'll see a lot more testimonials, not only coming up on our YouTube channel, but if you go to our website, buildmysportsbiz.com and you click on Mastermind, you'll see tons of testimonials there. If you go to my Instagram page, you can see over 100 testimonials on that page as well. So that's it. Shoot me a quick text and I'll see you there. See you later.


welcome. I'm going to get up here and talk a little bit about some research I've been doing on LTE emissions. Not so much looking at protocol or data but just what can we see flying around in the air and I'm going to do it with RTL SDRs. A couple of people that have made this talk happen or this story happened a few years ago Melissa Elliott did a talk at Defcon 21 on crazy stuff in the noise floor that she was exploring with RTL SDRs and when I saw that talk that inspired me to take up that research on what fun bits of data are flying around there. Also you have Erin if you're here I'd love to talk to you and shake your hand. This guy has done a tremendous amount of research on fixing a lot of the clock drift problems when you're trying to synchronize to RTL SDRs. I used everything that he did to get to where this talk is. So we're going to go down this road. It's going to wind a lot of different places. Start with a little bit of history on direction finding on radio exploitation. Just straight RF out. Why do we care? I'm going to give you a quick primer on time of arrival direction finding. Then I'm going to talk about why the RTL SDR is a terrible radio. And then go over some of the processes I'm using to do direction finding with RTLs. So here we are. We have a boat in the water that's really hard to see. You're a 1940 battle of the Atlantic, World War II. How do we find the U boats? They have these antenna masks on the top that occasionally when they pop out of the water emit signals. Those signals are coded messages encrypted messages but they are still RF emissions. Anyone can pick them up. You don't have to be able to decrypt them to put up your antenna and receive that data. So then we get a whole lot of these guys. They put cans on their head and they turn a whole bunch of knobs and try to figure out what the position of that signal is through a few different kinds of techniques. Using very expensive, very large equipment. The wavelengths on these transmissions were huge. So to do direction finding you needed like national infrastructure or at least real estate to park lots and lots of antennas. Today we have this guy. He's on the Wikipedia page for fox hunting which has become the modern approach to direction finding.  So there is and I guess you need a trendy headband. So it's going to get a little technical. This is how direction finding happens with time arrival. The principle here like the main piece of math that's going to happen is we're going to have two antennas or two antennae that are going to receive the same signal and then we're going to compare the time difference of that signal arriving at the antenna to get a line of bearing to the transmitter.  This is obviously something that you have to have a really bursty or discreet signal. If it's always transmitting you can't catch the time of arrival as easily. Receiver A has a time stamp for when the signal hits. Receiver B then has a slightly later time stamp and we have let's see an identical signal traveling at or the same signal traveling at the same speed through a constant atmosphere. So a lot of assumptions here to arrive at two known positions. Based on the distance between the receivers and the distance and the time of arrival or the difference in the time of arrival you can create a hyperbola that shows all the possible locations of the transmitter. We don't care about modeling the actual hyperbola I just want to know what the asymptotes are. So if you dig back into your high school trig if you just take the cosine of that angle of attack or that line of bearing it's going to be the time of arrival divided by the distance between the two points. So using that we can draw two possible lines that this transmitter can be from. If you only have two receivers you're always going to have two different places to guess and go look for it. So how do we solve that problem and get to position? This is classic triangulation. When people are saying I'm going to triangulate your signal three antennas a little bit of trigonometry and we get a shape that looks like this where we have three receivers they're all getting time of arrival measurements. We're going to take those same cosines of the angles to get six lines. Three of the lines are going to diverge off into space hopefully three of the lines are going to converge. If you've got clock drift in your radios if you have really terrible RTL-SDRs they're using as your receivers sometimes all six lines diverge and you just have to wait for everything to sync up. So we've talked about the history of direction finding I've given you a little bit on the math that's behind time of arrival. How many of you guys have heard of an RTL-SDR? Awesome. Okay. They're cheap. That's something that I really like about playing with them especially if I need three of them I'm not going to go out and get three blade IRFs to do a pet time of arrival project on a couple of weekends. It's a lot of budget for an entry level exercise. But the RTL-SDRs I was like alright they're like $16 on the internet so how bad can they be? I'm using the E4000s because I was interested in tracking LTE signals and I had to get up into the higher band. If you buy a brand new RTL-SDR like just straight off of Amazon it's a newer chip that doesn't tune all the way up to LTE 1900 which is what we have here in Las Vegas. So this project with newer radios you've got to find a place where they're using the 800 band LTE. This is the E4000 on the right. On the left is the stock terrible antenna that comes with the E4000. But that stock terrible antenna and the E4000 are able to pick up clean ADSB signals which is what's coming off the airplanes to the air traffic control to show they're heading and position and flight identifiers that kind of information. If you go on Reddit and you get in the RTL-SDR community and say I want to pick up ADSB everyone's going to tell you you've got to get a better antenna and you've got to run wires out to your house and get it high up in the air and throw away the antenna that comes with your chip. Don't do any of that. Just use the stock antenna when you're getting started playing. It lowers that initial investment and it works. This was live data from actually from here this morning. Yeah, it's not garbage. It's terrible but it's not garbage. So if you want to get started it will work. So this is my disclaimer. I have not a radio guy by trade. I've definitely done a lot of analysis of pre-collected signals but digital signal processing is not my formal education. So I'm about to do a lot of terrible things. Let's do direction finding with the RTL-SDR. So we said before that we need to have three antennas to do position direction finding. So I'm just going to buy three of these $16 things, hook them all up to my PC and this is just going to work, right? There's my RTL-SDR. I'm going to replace each of the transmitters in my original diagram or sorry, each of the receivers with RTLs. And it's just going to work. It's not going to work. One of the major problems with these is the oscillator is extremely sensitive to temperature. If you have like a fan blowing near your computer and you have two RTLs sitting next to each other and one is getting the fan more directly than the other, your center frequencies can start to drift very quickly, which breaks time of arrival. There's also issues with the clock. Because they're coming in over USB, if you try to sync two of these devices on the system with the CPU there's bus lag from the USB, there's clock drift across the devices, the temperature sensitive oscillator is just going to break down all your calculations. You're going to attempt to geolocate something and it's going to tell you that it's 25,000 miles away and it doesn't make any sense. So what do we do about clock synchronization? This is where US work came in. He had spent a lot of time trying to solve this problem. Turns out that the reference for the RTLs that have come out has a pin that you can use for a clock in. So all you've got to do is crack open your $16 radio and solder on the clock out from one of them onto the other two and now suddenly you're using the same system clock for all three devices. You're not trying to sync on the CPU and you can actually do a little bit of direction finding if you get a good signal.  So like I said before it doesn't make the RTL a great radio. It's still bad but with a little bit of clock sync and math and good signals and that's what I'll get into next is what kind of signals does this work with? You can go and direction find devices using a couple of RTLs, three RTLs. Bursty digital comms. This is where it works and this is where we get into why I chose LTE. When I was surveying the space around where I live there are a lot of LTE uplinks and I thought hey that would be really cool if I could use my triangulation technique to track all the cell phones. And some of them are cars and some of them are other devices but basically I'm assuming if it's LTE and it's uplink and I can receive it, it's probably a phone. GSM is also good. It's pretty wide. It's not as loud. It's closer to the noise floor and the RTLs really struggle with that because everything looks like noise on one with the stock antenna. CB radio is pretty good too just because it's super loud. You get a very clear signal when you're trying to play with this. Walkie talkies are the same way. A lot of construction guys around us that I've been able to put very precise dots on where they're sitting in their yellow iron. One of the other things that's kind of exciting. This is a signal that I collected in the U.S. and you'll see that it's in the 900 uplink. Well maybe you can see. There's some numbers right there. That's not a licensed band for GSM in the U.S. that's a European channel. So this was a signal that I was interested in geolocating because obviously somebody is using a system that either is completely undocumented or they shouldn't be. And because the width of the signal is fairly wide unlike kind of the walkie talkie CB stuff that gets very narrow. If the clocks drift on the RTLs or the oscillators drift and my center frequencies get off, my time of arrival is still the same. I'm going to show that if I have one RTL where the true center frequency is slightly to the left of where I'm trying to tune it and another slightly to the right, I'm still going to get the same time of arrival. So that's why LTE is easy to track with three RTLs. And that's my research so far. I'm going to be hanging out at the wireless village tomorrow. If anybody wants to see this thing fly, my Kibana box does not plug into a VGA. So I'm not going to show it live in here, but yeah. Thanks for coming out.


Blackstone Audio Presents Biopunk Solving Biotech's Biggest Problems in Kitchens and Garages By Marcus Wolson This book is read by Paul Michael Garcia To Rosemary Every orchid or rose is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people There will be do-it-yourself kits for gardeners who will use genetic engineering to breed new varieties of roses and orchids Also kits for lovers of pigeons and parrots and lizards and snakes to breed new varieties of pets Breeders of dogs and cats will have their kits too Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children Will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures Freeman Dyson, Our Biotech Future The New York Review of Books, July 19, 2007 The commission believes that unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency It is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013 The commission further believes that terrorists are more likely to be able to obtain and use a biological weapon than a nuclear weapon The commission believes that the US government needs to move more aggressively to limit the proliferation of biological weapons and reduce the prospect of a bioterror attack World at Risk The report of the commission on the prevention of WMD proliferation and terrorism, December 2008 Preface, bringing a child into the world is always taking a great measure of faith No matter when or where, parents have always had to believe that the future offered their kids something better, or at least not something worse Now is a weird time to have a child I wonder if parents ever had so many reasons to be pessimistic while at the same time feeling confident that their kids have a good chance at leading remarkable lives The promises and perils of technology weigh heavily on both sides of this emotional seesaw A few years ago the economist ran a cover story on some slightly obtuse advances in the scientific Sample complete, ready to continue?


Hi again. Let me rephrase the question from yesterday. I just popped up on Bloomberg. Turkey seeks to be the first NATO member to join the China-Land SEO. The market signals, I loved your speech, but it was wonderful, but the market has clearly been confirming everything you've said so far. What's it going to take for Europe to flip sides? For Europe to what? To flip get away from its vassal status and look east. Yes, difficult to say. Initially, you know, when when the whole thing started, there was a celebration of European unity. This brings us all together. Because now we are all in that same sort of war, and we love each other all as opposed to them. In the meantime, of course, you see that the European Union is on the verge of breaking apart. The Hungarian stone co-operate there in different countries.  And the Germans, of course, there should be inner European solidarity. So if the European Union breaks apart, which I can imagine would be possible if that war drags on for another year or so, then that might also initiate some sort of break with the US. They are also celebrated, for instance, that NATO has, again, been expanded, including now Sweden and Finland. But I think Sean Geb yesterday talked about these types of problems, too. That all of this increases conflicts, because you have now lots of small countries that are in a position to provoke major wars. I think Lithuania has behaved in a way that I think is just absolutely stupid. That is, trying to escalate the whole thing, even though you must know that even if the United States would come to your help, which I doubt very much, there would be nothing left of Lithuania. I mean, that takes one day and the whole country is finished. And that other countries like Germany and so forth do not realize that even support Lithuania in these extra provocations that they do. Yeah, how can I say? A situation that I never imagined would be possible. But may I add something especially concerning Europe? I can imagine that from a very general point of view, you know, Google Earth view, also historically, that we have areas of concentration, like US, like China, like Russia, more or less maybe. And Europe was something like the rest of it decentralized. I do not speak now about Africa and South America, that's not the story. But among these, I think Europe is sort of area of still living decentralization. And the typical character of Europe during history was decentralization. With attempts, of course, decentralization, with these empires, different empires, but in principle that was decentralized. Now there is a next attempt going on towards decentralization with the EU toward the United States of Europe. And let's hope that that won't work, that the decentralized aspect is perhaps still living. There are diversity, many languages, many cultures. So that could be maybe the place where decentralized could start worldwide in the end, perhaps, and such problems like Brexit and problems with Poland, with Hungary and so on. These could be signs that something is going on in that direction. I hope so, at least. What I find most extraordinary is the degree to which history has been wiped out of this perception of conflict. In the few you talked about is that until a year ago, everybody knew that Ukraine was a corrupt concoction and the remainder of the policies of Lenin and Stalin and Khrushchev. The country of Ukraine is not older than the communist takeover in Russia. And all these historical dimensions which are very pertinent to what actually happens, never make it into the media. So everything depends on whether the narrative in the media will ever break down or erode, because as long as this narrative is kept alive by the professional tabulated class, not the PFS, but the media societies, the global media societies which dominate the perception of everything. I noticed when the COVID pandemic struck, there were a few people that contacted me and said, this cannot be true. And the story was, the media are lying to us and then the moment COVID disappears from the front page and Ukraine was there, they were fully embracing the media narrative of the Ukraine war. And you were always on the defensive as long as this idea that truth is coming from the media, because it's direct from television, because it's direct because CNN has reported somewhere in a hotel telling you something. As long as this perception persists, I don't see what else to expect except one crisis after another, a fabrication of crisis, and it will always be the same players behind it because only a few interests are capable of mobilizing all these people at the same time. And that is perhaps the biggest challenge not to give in in the first place and second to spread doubt and skepticism. Otherwise, I don't know. Maybe. Ukraine in the current size has never really existed. The large parts were part of the Austrian Empire. Poland ruled large parts of the Ukraine for a while. The Crimea has always been a Russian place, even Odessa. So to pretend now that this is some sort of historically grown nation that has always existed in the current composition is just plain nonsense. But the media, as you said, they presented Ukraine as obvious like this. There are always Ukrainians and Ukrainians. No, that is not even... All of these people currently living in what is now defined as Ukraine consider themselves Ukrainian. Professor Hoppe, I have a question for you about the process of centralization with the globalization and also we're coming from the centralized Europe. But recently the pandemic war was supposed to centralize. The European nations would say also centralize it with the USA. There are processes of harmonization of the law, unification of the law. Even in America, you need to apply some regulation in terms of financial markets into European Union. So the question is, does it stop and actually we start the process of decentralization once again because of the war and because of the energy crisis and everything that is happening and the centralization maybe will it move to digital space like CBDCs, single, some currency areas that can be brought from the CBDCs, first national CBDCs but then worldwide one currency, central bank digital currency. I'm not saying that Bitcoin would be... they're not pushing for Bitcoin obviously, but is it the process will start a stop on the institutional level and move to more decentralization and centralization would be in digital space. So what do you think about that? Now there are processes of centralization that are good. I'd say if we would have a one-world money as we did have under the gold standard that is an eminently reasonable centralization because just having one currency is more efficient than having multiple currencies. On the other hand if you have fiat currencies then you would rather want to have competition between them because that curtailes the natural inclination of every fiat money producer to produce more fiat money because then the exchange rate of these currencies would continuously decline and people would go someplace else. We see that that's why we have this tendency of Bitcoin people try to avoid fiat currencies. As far as the question is concerned whether this type of tendency will also lead to... will be completely independent of the territorial concentration. I'm not so sure about that because again there will be always a tendency to enlarge your turf and then regulate even the different types of currencies that might exist before. It's hard to say what will result from all of this. I mean as David Durst said I hope this will initiate a process also of territorial decentralization which then automatically also implies some sort of monetary decentralization but does not take away the incentive to create some global currency because economic reason speaks in favor of a worldwide currency except not the fiat currency. But I'm not sure if I address the question that you asked or I missed some of your points. And also something that theory or that approach that maybe on the certain condition one currency could be an advantage. I'm not the economist or the specialist in this but I just asked you points already that why not to have several currencies good currencies in neutral competition but they do not fit for everything. One currency does more fit for small payments another currency for treasuring and so on and that they're like car competition car is more fit for you know countryside the other one for the cities smaller big accounts and so on why not having different currencies for different purposes and apart from that I think that a dominant currency like the U.S. dollar is not covered by gold anymore that's not by coincidence that's because they have a no no they're legal but they fucked up monopoly and monopolies are always abused and that's why they have the arrogance to drop the gold standard. I have to contradict that a little bit from a purely economic point of view a single currency offers tremendous advantages if you have multiple currencies you are in a system of partial barter so it is precisely the purpose of money to avoid barter trade so under the gold standard we did have an international monetary standard the entire world more or less the entire world used the same commodity as money and you can have that in any denomination that you want I mean for small transactions you can also sometimes have tickets that entitled you to a certain amount of gold and so forth but you want to facilitate trade it is always an advantage to have a single currency that we have so to speak a dollar standard is simply due to the fact that the United States is a supreme military power the United States was in favor of the introduction of the euro because this way you only have to go to the central bank in Frankfurt and give them orders before you had to go to Bonn and then you had to go to Paris and then you had to go to Madrid and all shape them up and then the euro was introduced to weaken in particular the German mark because the composition of these central banking committees now there is one German in it or maybe two if I am not sure about these details anymore when I was still teaching that stuff I knew these things in the meantime my interest in those things has somewhat declined but the German guy is now surrounded by a Spanish central banker by a French central banker by an Italian central banker and one of these people is more incompetent than the next Mrs. Lagarde is a typical example of what's saying when it's inflation we don't really understand the phenomenon of inflation really what kind of statement is this from the head of the European central bank we understand the nature of inflation for hundreds of years and that woman she has I don't know what her background is maybe she runs a suntan salon I mean she must spend plenty of time in the suntan salon to look at her so Dr. Hopper I completely agree with you that we should weep so when I asked a question yesterday saying inflation is rampant and people in Turkey seem no I didn't say it's okay I am saying that given over the Covid crisis for the past two years people were okay were okay by the government locked them down closing their business injecting something into their body they don't like but they can put up with it so I mean for the inflation debt to Germans or the Europeans that they are going to experience or the war that many people will be killed if they can put up with what they experience in Covid which is already so bad and they can still support the government then what else can stop them from stopping the craziest thing that's going on in Ukraine what else can stop them and except weeping what else can we individual do and also I doubt if the Ukraine or Russia what they do may not be so much matter but I am thinking about whether the financial market in response to the high inflation or the anticipated higher interest rate would there be a scenario that the collapse of it may stop all the crazy things going on please vote for everyone on the panel yeah of course in a way you would want to hope for some sort of economic collapse in order to shape up the governments on the other hand the economic collapse sometimes lead to even worse results I mean then the call for a strong man usually arises somebody that gets us out of the trouble I don't see any I'm pretty sure that there will be an economic collapse what comes out of this economic collapse that depends of course to a large extent on the state of public opinion but currently all voices like mine or most of the people here have no hearing there are very few people who can break through to the mainstream media appear on TV that are not to say these things on the other hand I have not lost all my optimism I appeared on some Austrian TV shows for a few times and said these sorts of things and based on the number of letters that I get then I would say hey what I say there are lots of people think the same way there are opinion polls in Austria my impression is a sort of the Austrian people agreed with me when I said you have to immediately stop the sanctions and then you can have warm showers again but as I said there is only one TV station in the entire German speaking area that once in a while admits crazy people like me to say a few words the rest of it they would never touch me on German TV for instance they would not dare to invite me because as you know I am not all that friendly towards these people do you? Well I would like to remind you that when you think about these questions you ask these questions and they all have the setting of society and the answers all go in the direction of society all these structures these are structures behind your question and structures behind the answer but there are other ways of survival I discussed the convivial orders and the community orders apart from societal orders because societal orders are by definition governed orders they have a need to government or they cannot function but community orders and conviviality orders they are not governed they have a very different political philosophy now for lack of time I did not go into the political philosophy aspect but the traditional even the language has disappeared I make it clear the traditional way for speaking about the governance not the government but the governance of community orders is in terms of rulers rulers are the judges and at one point someone mentioned I think it was I don't remember who it was the biblical book of Samuel so the reference was to people want a king in the Bible and this was despite the advice of the wise man the ruler the judge Samuel now the ruler advises people but he has no commanding power and when the people ask for a king they wanted someone the strong man who would be able to do great things just by speaking them into existence or the commander and if we speak to other people we know we cannot command them that's the experience of daily life but nowadays everything is projected onto a societal scene which is majestic it has many rooms and nobody has ever seen all the rooms and we are easily impressed with the things governors say later this great politician in my country he was at that time the economics minister and he began his speech with saying I am so busy I hardly see my top functionaries except at the weddings of their daughters and then he ended his speech two hours later saying while somebody has to have a good overview of the situation to make the final decision so he doesn't know what happened but he claims to have an overview of everything and he gets away with it because nobody else has an overview of everything and the whole language of centralized control is really bluff but as long as the bluff works the centralization seems to work but it's a house of cars and this can collapse at any moment but to accomplish what you want you need in a way is a session right? yeah no the session is movements I mean a start of that would be the dissolution of the European Union and maybe then it continues and smaller units are breaking away and you have then again communal relationships instead of what you call society or relationships but whether that is in the cars I'm also not so sure I like very much when you said it's a house of cars and actually it's not a stable situation maybe this was my approach would be this is a very fundamental question how should it go on and how is it possible to communicate this way of thinking and looking at to see how it is I sometimes compare it with what happened to the church namely the Catholic church there were times where the church was absolutely an authority everybody obeyed to it they were very strict against heretics that were the very big danger for the structure because the belief in the system could be challenged and I think that is an interesting approach to challenge the belief in this crazy statism that in truth these are violent gangs which is just true these are organizations they have money from the people and to show that and to speak about it to communicate this way of thinking and if this works beside many other things maybe some specific c-session programs things like that this happens to the state the same what happened to the church the church was never abolished the church was forgotten of course yes there is a church that's true some go there and that's fine if they are convinced of that system but it's their church and nobody dares to force somebody to be a member and it could be that way I remember on a very small basis in Switzerland when people began to withdraw from the church the church and in Switzerland there is a tradition that church taxis depending on the official taxis a certain percentage they're very crazy but that's the system in many cantones in Switzerland and in that time when many people went out of the church they declared their exit of the church the church came to them and tried to negotiate the rate of the tax would you remain a member when you just pay half of the usual and maybe when it goes in such a direction that people are not interested anymore in these crazy structures that they do not believe in it maybe that could be an approach to work on to think about these crazy structures thank you very much for your presentations the next few days we will leave Planet Bodrum and turn through the real world so we need some practical advice starting from the conflict between Russia and Ukraine how should a person from a libertarian point of view deal with a superior bully could you develop each of you how should I deal with my own state and how should I deal with foreign bully states what's the right attitude is there anything general that we can say you didn't understand do you hear me is there anything general that should deal with a bully his own government and a superior foreign government wisdom that's all I can say you have to assess how dangerous is this bully how many allies would I have if I go against him how much should I tolerate when should I give up move some place else I think you do you have an answer to that question no but you are the expert I'm no more an expert on these types of questions than you are I mean this is this is just you have this problem on one to one level if you have a really nasty neighbor what can you do about this nasty neighbor sometimes it's easy you get your friends together and give them one on the nose unfortunately that's not so easy with places like Russia I guess I can't go to Putin and give him one on the nose I think making fun of one's own gangsters is probably an advisable strategy it will be difficult for them to attack you if you only make fun of them because in order to attack other people you need a certain amount of support from on your own side all people around me he just made a joke about such and such you cannot possibly dare to kill him or jail him or so but when that point is reached how many jokes you can make and how drastic the jokes can be there's also a question of wisdom you have to understand the method of the social sciences we must understand our enemies I mean people like me are criticized for putting understanding but understanding somebody does not mean that you agree with this yet to find out what their motives are what their goals are and then you have to adjust to this I don't think there is a general rule that applies to this there can be thousands of different situations that require thousands of different answers to it but you give me the answer tonight why do you make difficult questions like this still didn't understand fully the bully is that now Putin or is that just once you have a problem with some gang leader so to speak so I mean maybe it's the same question we had before how do we approach this problem altogether so just how to deal with the realities of these status structures and I think then again we have this problem of that people believe in it and then it's very difficult to convince them or to inform them that it's not worth believing it anymore in these structures and I think it's always a big dilemma when you try to position yourself within this scheme shall you enter into these structures in order to change them from the inside there are approaches like that that people libertarians they compete with being elected in some parliaments or so in order then to try to change the whole system but I think that won't be a consistent way because maybe on a psychological level you will become part of that system earlier or sooner or later like the green party in the parliament in Germany many decades ago already they said we are only for two years then we change and I think the first change did not take place these are illusions I think maybe it could be a program I thought about once to compete with the program to liquidate this organization so you won't be elected as the CEO or so in economic terms but the liquidator and the job is to liquidate there will be no actions anymore concerning going further but liquidation that could be a program I do not know that at this moment you have much success with it but that could be a consistent way to try to do it from the internal approach Frank is the oldest here even older than I am so he has accumulated more wisdom so maybe he knows the answers to this complicated question it's a complicated question but if you project it into the societal background then of course the bully the man with the tattoos will smash your head in and things like that you do not have to fear him because he will just pass and go away the real bullies are the administrators the people at the top who will revoke your license to do whatever and people do not have rights that does not exist in a society we talk about a rise in society but that is a memory of earlier times when societies were small compared to the communal convivial order the Christian world was the ruling idea and it imposed order and ideas of right and wrong on the world but the moment societies rise above all these ingrained sources of value and normativeness you lose the possibility of arguing for right and wrong because it is decided for you and it is not decided in terms of right and wrong this is the efficient or the effective policy that we are pursuing and you are permitted to join it if you do not then we will revoke your license or you pay more taxes or whatever this is the kind of bullying that is most effective because it can be started and propagated with a single word at the top of the social hierarchy we saw that in the Covid period why did all these independent or self-employed people suddenly put on masks or close their doors and do all these silly things not because they were so afraid of the virus but they were I am going to lose my license I am not it is not a free profession as they sometimes call themselves still they are functionaries of a huge machinery and that is the bullying power but you can as an individual you can oppose it at the lowest level you can oppose it at the lowest level the man at the desk not the higher ups but the man at the desk you can still talk to him it is not very easy to do so but you can always bluff him down so I remember one occasion when for some silly reason he refused to accept my photo for my passport because it was not recent enough and then he turned it around and said see it has a blue background so that proves it is too old I said you shouldn't get excited and he said why should I not get excited I said you didn't make these silly regulations did you and he turned away and put a stamp on it but these are very small consolations you do not defeat a bureaucracy in that way defeating a bureaucracy is almost impossible unless it defeats itself when it makes itself so hated or so incompetent that it collapses as another house of cards as long as there are cards available they build another one I have a question Hans I do agree with your analysis of the current situation but I still have a doubt given as the world has been going in lockstep during the last two years I think I am afraid that the push towards one world government is way further ahead than we think and so I have a doubt is it possible that it is all a great show like David Durwood would say and that Putin is part of the show and it is very useful to have this war going on because this is useful to do what they are doing destroying Europe destroying little businesses and so on so this is my doubt maybe it is all part of a great scheme of a great representation they are pushing forward to our disadvantage you are revealed now as one of the biggest conspiracies that I have thought in a while that might well be true I would like to see a little bit more evidence of it but again we are dealing with extremely evil people on all sides who knows what they have done and arranged in the back rooms of which only very few people have an idea I doubt it however because any type of conspiracy obviously but conspiracies are difficult difficult to organize somebody has obviously an incentive to spill the beans that's all I can say I wouldn't rule it out currently I don't see enough reasons to think that way for the reason that conspiracies very small conspiracies are easy to do 3, 4, 5 people can do something like this but as soon as more people are involved they have to be quiet nobody should spill the beans the larger the group is the more difficult it is not to have somebody who does spill the beans well there is a remark by Marshal McLuhan the communication specialist who was very famous when I was younger and he said remember only the small secrets have to be protected the big secrets are protected by the mentality of the public they will not refuse it they can't be that bad that's a factor you have to reckon into the equation and of course the notion of the open conspiracy which was launched towards the end of the 19th century in the circles where H.G. Wells was active that's basically the same idea you conspire but you do it so openly that people think that must be ok otherwise they would not be doing it that's open conspiracy is that going on that Z and Putin and Biden are all working on the same project I think that would be a rush conclusion but it is true of course that even Putin was once a member of the Young Leaders Program of the World Economic Forum but I think he is not the best pupil in the class oh come on now that's enough for today I thank you all for listening and we will see each other at dinner time