Hello, everybody. Welcome to the impact session on harnessing technology for environmental sustainability. Today we'll be discussing text role when it comes to and how to contribute to climate change, how technology from AI to logistics can have positive impact when it comes to tackling environmental challenges. How sectors can prioritize initiatives their partnerships policy practices and how reaching these goals will take immense coordination from both governments and the private sector. And how we can reunite the tech sector to achieve the 2030 vision. So, for many of you who are visiting and joining by toppling. You can also share some of your comments as well as some of your questions and zoom chat box during this session. And so the goal of the session really is to explore and to provide some framing around why technology is so important in this conversation. Yes, it's helped societies and it's caused many environmental and social problems as well but it's also that key center focus. When it comes to addressing that global climate change challenges. And we've obviously seen record amounts of challenges from the climate change with record levels of air travel that's the client but we're still seeing those data show up we had almost the hottest weather on record last year. And secondly how the developments we're seeing has warranted further investments in tech and innovation, and what I mean by that is that pandemic has led to not only a global health crisis but it's also led to global economic crisis. So making sure that the public funds that are available are also getting allocated to climate protection as well. This is where also the for IR can play a vital role. So we're going to kick this session off into two sections, the first panel discussion with our speakers who you will meet very shortly, and then a more detailed discussion, limited to our four members and partners in a breakout session. So I want to introduce our panel first anger Anderson is the executive director of the United Nations environment program. Pat gill singer as a CEO of VMware soon to start at Intel in mid February, and Rebecca Massey Zach is the CEO of tech soup and Diego says gill is the founder and chief executive officer of Pachama. So I wanted to start off with a question here to the group. We're beginning a new year with a new administration with the Biden presidency, where climate change is going to be a top priority. Thanks so we've also joined the planet at Paris climate accord more eos to come. I want to ask the group. How do you see technologies role in facilitating this goal. And if you can share some brief story, or an experience that you had that inspired these actions as well. I want to share some of those insights to the audience and what each and everyone can do to more rapidly scale technology for those global goals, whether it be the policy part the practice part or the partnership part. So in girl start off with you. Well, thank you and it's a pleasure to be here. Look. Yes, we have a new administration in the US but I'd like to posit that the American economy never left Paris. There might have been a federal decision to leave but the American economy actually was in Paris. What's really good is that now we have the political leadership to move this forward but I think it's, it's important to to mention that. And so of course we're delighted with with the decision to come back in. But what we really need to think about is to build that future that does not rely on coal or extractives or concrete etc. We need to think about circularity we need to understand I work for the United Nations environment entity right. So we need to understand we can't continue to take stuff out of the environment or resources put them into the economy and discard them back into the environment as emissions as trash as even waste etc. And here digital technologies have a critical role to play. You know, how are we going to think about funding how can we use technology for power plants how can we use transportation as a vehicle service. How can we do digital financing crowdfunding. All of these things are beginning to offer us up new opportunities. And I think it's very worth while thinking about that we in the UN and our Secretary General speak about these two mega trends that we need to be mindful of one climate change. Another one digital technology, understanding these two mega trends and how they can intersect which is part of your question is part of this, the story of the solutions. And I think when we begin you want us for a little story and I'm aware that we have to do all of this in a couple of minutes. But what we're seeing inside games gaming is interesting, because, you know, billions of people are in the gaming industry, play games, anyone who has a teenager in their lives will know this. And so, and, and, and it offers an opportunity and we are doing about working with the gaming industry to provide these digital nudges to make young people aware. And, and, for example, wanna, we've worked with at Forest by and financial, they have used this so that you can put a few cents in. And this and get a book for your energy credits of what you're doing. And this is again gets translated into tree planting hundred and 22 million trees have now been actual physical real trees have been planted through this. And there are a lot and this is, I mean, a small example, but not an unimportant one. So look, there's lots to be done, but technology will be part of the solution not part of the problem. Thank you. And, and Pat, VMware and you really, you recently released the 2030 agenda as well. How do you see a text role in facilitating some of these goals we outlined. Thank you so much. And, you know, clearly, I think we all look at the new administration with optimism. As they come in and clearly their tech agenda, I think will be more significant, more aligned and at least we now have a president who believes there might be a problem right, you know, encouraging for all of us. You know, I'll start with a little bit of the story, and maybe two little brief ones I was having a conversation with my daughter in law. And now with three, you know, with three married children, one of them is a writer so a bit of a protagonist and she loves to debate with me. She was complimenting me on some of my accomplishments, but knowing her of course there was something more at work, and she says, but did you have to bankrupt my planet to do so. And it was one of those, you know, very sharp points in the conversations just always stuck with me, you know, have we left the planet a better place for our children and grandchildren. And a little story was the, I think it was what October 9 was the orange day in the Bay Area. Right when we saw the fires just you know in the smoke filled air and from where I'm standing literally, I could see the fires on a far ridge. Right, you know, almost 20 miles or so from our house. At that point and we were getting notices all night long about potentially needing to evacuate and I called it the triple. Right, we saw the social issues. Right, we saw the pandemic issues. And we saw environmental issues, you know, three things, all sort of cascading right together and it was probably the only day as we've gone through the pandemic, but I actually felt very depressed. I felt very optimistic person but all of a sudden, all of these coming together it's like this is a point where, boy, no it's not okay. And I think with that as we think about and I've spent my career as a technologist and I like to think about this period of time that we're in, you know, where the superpowers of technology are greater than ever. Right, as we see him lifting more and more of the economic progress of the planet, you know, as we're encroaching on you know we can see in sight where we'll have literally 90% of humanity is being connected. Right, where we're seeing you know things like cloud and AI being able to touch more and more of humanity. And we truly say we are going to use those superpowers of technology as a shaping as a force for good, and particularly start to attack some of these triple issues, pandemics, social change and climate change at scale. And obviously I'm here because I fundamentally believe that is the case, and it is not only our opportunity, but I actually think it's the obligation of tech leaders to be truly shaping technology as that force for good. Yeah, and Rebecca, when it comes to partnerships, I mean you work with so many different tech companies so you have a wide preview and approach of this technique so I'm curious what your thoughts on all that. Thank you Sally and thank you to the forum for bringing me to this panel I'm really delighted to be able to bring a broad civil society perspective to this important topic. This is a nonprofit network that operates a platform to bring tech and resources from 100 corporations and 400 foundations to civil society organizations in 200 countries. Environmental sustainability and other global goals can be accelerated by expanding the engagement and trust of communities and technology is a key enabler. And today are really inspired by the 11,000 community based organizations focused on environmental sustainability who are reached by tech supes platform, as well as the hundreds of thousands of community organizations we reach to focus on societal issues, exacerbated by climate and other environmental issues. These tend to be smaller organizations whose names you may not recognize, yet they are deeply engaged with their local communities, and it is this last mile where community organizations shine that inspires me and hold significant potential. I'd like to share one example. Makaya, a civil society organization has led diverse projects in Colombia and regionally for 14 years to strengthen capacities for social development through cooperation technology and innovation. They saw opportunity for multi stakeholder impact from a regulatory change making TV white space technology available for internet access. Makaya focused on farming communities in historical conflict zones. They brought together local government members and corporations such as a lo and partners la vaza Microsoft and SAP, and they engaged other civil society organizations to train young people on sophisticated digital tools for advanced fleet management devices, market information and soil water and air monitoring tools. They did so without leaving behind the farmers who had been there for years. Makaya also followed a similar model to bring internet access and training to rural schools and with another project helped citizens learn how to use coffee cup sized air sensors to collect air quality data and influence local government decision makers. This last mile human connections demonstrate how the impact of environmental sustainability initiatives is enhanced by trusted relationships and people who have firsthand knowledge of needs and personal stakes in the intended outcomes. I believe that three actions are essential to establish this type of meaningful engagement through civil society organizations, first enable two way sharing of information, not just two communities but also from engaged civil society and the implementation of regulations and the solutions, they see the gaps and they know how to fill them. And third, engage civil society organizations and monitoring the impacts and reporting the unintended consequences of policies regulations and solutions, investing in these engagement models and in digital infrastructure that includes civil society organizations and these new ways represents a significant opportunity to accelerate environmental sustainability. Thank you. Wait a segue to Diego. Diego your company Pachima and I'll have you explain a little bit more is a machine learning company that uses lighter technology to accurately verify carbon capture by force. So by that my assumption is that a lot of government participation is needed. Do you have any thoughts on what Rebecca had also said and also just from your purview what your thoughts are. Yeah, thank you Sally and thank you. That was for inviting us to participate at Pachima.  And we work with corporations such as Microsoft and Amazon and Shopify that are looking to achieve net zero by supporting projects that are removing carbon from the atmosphere. And, you know what we're seeing is that yes technology plays a fundamental role on bringing transparency, accountability and efficiency on these markets because carbon markets have an enormous potential to drive funding to the necessary solutions to climate change, but we do need all the latest technologies at the service of making these markets work effectively. In terms of a story that inspired us. You know this idea actually came when I was visiting the Amazon rainforest in Peru. I'm originally from Argentina I was doing a trip with my brothers, and we met several landowners that actually could participate in carbon markets, but they had the big barrier to entry to the market of having to hire consultants or auditors to come to the forest to do the carbon assessments. And meanwhile we have you know, an explosion of satellite data that is available to do analysis of the forest. And now with COVID you know auditors can actually not go to the forest to do the assessments so COVID has provided an acceleration of the need for the use of the latest technologies to address these issues. So yes, excited about the new administration excited about the acceleration of the adoption of technologies on solving climate change. And anger based on the conversation we just heard from our panelists, what is the, what's the UN's strategy, when it comes to accelerating some of these partnerships from private and public. Well, I mean we just heard an excellent example exactly of where the UN and technology meets beautifully because obviously these carbon deals are done how under the climate change convention because why because we agreed in Paris to drive towards 1.5. So it does take, it does take these actors we in UNEP and in the United Nations speak about these three planetary crisis the climate crisis, good examples. The pollution and waste crisis again think plastic think waste in the oceans etc, which also needs technology technology solutions, and the biodiversity and nature crisis again, where we're losing nature what species are we using how can we use local up loads of data and information to to help us understand how we are spending overspending our natural capital at too high a rate. So, the example that we just heard is is really great because we need to use that kind of technology in monitoring and data. And here, you know, in the United Nations environment program. This is exactly what we're going to be doing and we've established a new strategy that we're rolling out we have the big assembly, a couple of weeks from now with a global environmental data strategy dimension and and and inside of that. We really want to on the one hand, democratize environmental data we host an enormous amount of data as you can imagine, we are proud to host the IPCC we're proud to host IPCC twin which deals with biodiversity called it best we do the, the chemicals and we do all of these, this data needs to get out there, and people need to be able to understand it. And then they need intermediaries, just such as what we heard, so that we can monitor transparently and hold to account companies that are leaning in but at the same time, and there's that to do item for the technology industry, we need to be mindful that e-waste is something we can no longer afford. We produce about 50 million tons of e-waste a year, 50 million tons of e-waste a year. That is equivalent to all commercial airlines ever made, but we do that every year. So we cannot just throw that into the garbage we need to mine our waste and have that circularity. And that's part of the challenge that we are working with many governments on, as well as with companies, precisely to land some of these solutions. Yeah. When I think of another challenge and looking at it in the lens of corporations, Pat, is, you know, we briefly discussed VMware's vision for 2030 agenda and some of, and I'll highlight some of the goals that you have is reducing carbon emissions and funding will cover its sustainability projects around the world. That's two from many of the things you outlined. It also seems like you guys are moving away from CSR. It's actually being implemented in businesses. So one is, I know there's a lot of executives in the room and in the audience. How have you been able to convince your executives to get on board? So it's a business decision, not just a PR decision. And then the other question is the big question is, will you be implementing something similar and how do you think about this in your new role as CEO Intel? Yeah, thank you. And maybe, you know, before we talk a little bit about the 2030 goals, a little bit of the 2020 goals was a good, I'll say canary in the coal mine to what we could lay out for 2030 because you know the company and you know we had done this earlier in my 10 year I've been CEO of the company for eight years and we had our 2020 goals and they were around RE 100, right, you know, some different aspects of our, you know, power savings efficiency, some overall megaton goals for carbon reduction. And all of these, we, you know, built into the culture of the company, right, our values, and in that sense. And so the first piece of guidance I would give to any leader is this has to be seen as integrated into, you know, and I call the values of the company, the soul of the company, you know, it's who you are and you have to be reinforcing and building that. So when you try to then say it becomes a business responsibility, it can't be this other thing, right, you know, it already has to be part of who you are, and what you're trying to accomplish as a business of building it into the culture and values gives you that foundational element that you can actually say now let's build these next set of goals and as we've laid out our 30 goals for 2030. And a lot of that's inspired around the UN objectives that have been laid out, but also contextualized to our business and, you know, if you look at the 30 goals, you know, some of them we have no idea how we're going to accomplish them. You know, they're just these big audacious goals that are out there. Others we have very firm roadmaps okay we know what we're going to go do and how it's as composite of aspirational goals. And it's ones that we have very specific objectives against, you know, and then we're building them into the each of my BU and GM leaders has a piece of that that they're responsible for in their business as well. And we've managed the company a quarterly cycle as many companies do that we have the objectives of the company the CEO report card that I report out, you know, to the board, but also bind to all of our bonuses. Right, so if we don't do these hey it hurts our financial returns that we see as individuals, just like any other of our corporate objectives that we'd have so we're building it into our business processes in a natural and fundamental, fundamental way. We're also then saying and we've lined our 2030 goals over across trust, equity and sustainability. You know, so three categories that all 30 goals fit under that broader umbrella, you know, building trust, a lot of that's around cyber cyber attacks cybersecurity can the world trust the digital platforms that we're building for every aspect of humanity. You know, building our diversity inclusion training education, and then finally sustainability where many of these topics fall, but we're also then backing that up with some crazy project for saying let's go do some really innovative things and one of those. Of course that I'm really excited about is our establishing, you know, one of our major campuses here in California is the first micro grid. We've built you know battery arrays, you know solar panels, we're connecting it up to the power systems we're also making it an emergency response resource for the Palo Alto community here as well. And we're sort of saying, here's our crazy project that's innovative committing capital to it, and that we're then telling others join us in similar projects as well. It aligns with our long term goals, it aligns with our culture of innovation, and clearly saying we're going to move the needle in some very tangible ways that inspires one of the goals, but also brings inspiration to all 30 of the goals that we're building into our businesses processes as well. And you know I will say on the Intel front, obviously a much bigger company, you know, many different aspects, and I was actually pretty encouraged to see their 2030 goals weren't all that dissimilar to what we're laying out for VMware so I may not have too much unique work required to build on what they've already done but yes we'll be digging into this very shortly. That's great. Congratulations on your role. Oh thank you so much. Rebecca so jumping off of what Pat had said and around culture and and making sure that these aren't just audacious goals but we can actually execute on these goals. What do you see as the biggest barrier at this moment. I want to make the point that I think investment in technology enabled partnerships to really engage civil society. I think that Pat's comments about the soul of these organizations if I use that terminology are that they do bring some really core insights and capabilities but they're not well enabled to innovate with everyone else. There are areas of investment that I would call out. We need common standards and digital platforms to help us identify who these organizations are and their capabilities so people know how to find them to engage with them. We also need scale digital infrastructure for the sector itself. Common data models common applications ways to collaborate across issues and across geographies and even sectors. We need access to affordable connectivity application services and skills development because those are still not always available. And we need new collaboration frameworks and engagement models that really recognize civil society groups as full partners of equal import to corporates and governments in the common quest to accomplish the goals. And Diego for you to sitting on your side. What are your thoughts on maybe the biggest barriers that you might see. Yes, I mean I think we need more more collaboration. As Inger was saying before there's so much data out there that that data needs to be utilized right so we need all parties to come together and share data find ways to collaborate on on on on harnessing the latest technologies to analyze that data and we need more talent also coming to the sector of sustainability. It's been actually great to see here in Silicon Valley, a new excitement around climate tech, which is a new category in Silicon Valley. And there is a growing venture capital being invested and a lot of talent coming from different technology companies that want to work on climate. But we need more.  So we need all hands on deck. Every engineer, every scientist should be thinking how am I going to contribute to solving climate change. And in using human ingenuity that has brought us so many good things in the world. Now to solve this big challenge. Yeah, and just in the final minute or two we have Inger I wanted to ask you because we focused a lot on on tech, and especially in the barrier and in the US and stateside. But how do you see the challenges in emerging countries in tackling some of these issues that we talked about on the panel. You know, in a way. I think there may not be so much of an understanding how in fact, quote unquote emerging countries are better off at times because they can leapfrog on over some older technologies that they don't have landlines so forget about it so go straight to the next step. I live in Kenya, and in Kenya, as you know, they were the first to introduce mobile money some 15 years ago right and PESA. They have got really I mean they speak about silicon Savannah, please everybody come and invest. Instead of Silicon Valley the Silicon Savannah Savannah there's a lot going on there, and you have really leading bleeding edge startups and angel investors going in. You have a lot of innovation happening. I don't want to be polyanish and, and so on, but we do have what was in the early days on a very simple mobile phone platform right. You could get market data for your carrots and so you knew when you should take them to market that kind of information. So I think that emerging markets and markets that are yet to emerge actually have embraced technology more than maybe those in the hot spots of technology such as as California might realize. And so we are one global village and that's the exciting part about this. So as we all now sit in lockdown, as we all understand this pandemic as we've all learned about science and facts. Let's use the technology that let's use science and facts for making those leaps into the into the future, which are tackling these three planetary crisis that I spoke about. Yeah, I think that's a great place to end. And I want to thank everybody on the panel today on this discussion.


All right for the next talk we have Eric and he's going to talk about solving the internet problem Another thing that's here Okay Spoiler alert. No. I've been working in public health overseas in Botswana Conducting clinical trial research in HIV AIDS using electronic as academics like to call it data systems in remote areas of Botswana and Doing that despite having Not necessarily no internet, but no reliable internet Just a little bit about what's on it's a middle-income country landlocked in Southern Africa population now just over 2 million and It is landmass about the same size as Texas and although a bit drier In the drier parts of Texas that it kind of looks the same That's me at the last icon I was at in Namibia last year I'm the Former director of data operations in IT, so it's a pretty broad Job of the Botswana Harvard AIDS Institute I had a data management and IT teams there for over 25 NIH funded clinical trials and During that time we developed a clinical trial data management systems laboratory information systems and interface some of the analytical laboratory equipment and Right now I'm finishing up a trial that oddly enough. I'm running from the cloud which is We're enrolling people in Botswana Malawi Uganda, South Africa and Zimbabwe and I'm not a medical person But I've been surrounded by them for for a lot of years now I Clinical research in HIV AIDS, so this is an academic endeavor Our investigators and research teams were built from or made up of international and local people Our work is funded by competitive grants Almost exclusively from the National Institutes of Health here in the US All of our trials were conducted in Botswana. I worked for Max Essex at Harvard and being a virologist that he is all of our Trials were had a heavy laboratory component so in Included in collecting all the data. We also collected Probably a little bit over 600,000 blood specimens to go with that a Little bit about HIV AIDS in Botswana They I'm sure you know Well, I would say that the rip excuse me the real problem is not no infinite the real problem is the HIV epidemic You probably know a lot about it You also probably know about the epidemic even starting here in the 80s but that was followed with a heterosexual epidemic in in Africa and In Botswana around 1995 even though it already had started ramping up It was very clear that there was a very serious epidemic underway and by 2000 estimates were that 15 to 20 percent of the population was infected, which is Amazing life expectancy in Botswana was around 70 years and had dropped or expected to drop to around 40 and There were projections from the McKinsey group that Population of Botswana, which at that time was about 1.2 million would half within the next 10 to 15 years if nothing was done So in 2000 the president of Botswana stood in front of the UN and basically Sated that his population is looking at extinction if nothing is done we had already started in a trial funded by the NIH and Bristol-Miles Squibb Bristol-Meyer Squibb where we were looking at ways of rolling out already approved adult treatment and that sort of merged in 2002 into a national program, which meant that the government agreed to then fund free treatment testing monitoring whatever was necessary to get people On to the drugs were then available and that program which still continues today is the Probably the most successful one in the world at the moment for combating HIV So now to shift over a little bit about clinical trial data management Yeah, someone said to me don't worry. I won't ever need that data, but we always do Before I get into the solutions of what we did for offline use to take a few minutes Just to talk about clinical trial data management so that you can appreciate why given Limited resources and so on why don't we just keep it simple and flip back to paper because paper works, but so my role in all of this was to Support the research trials with data management and like I said, we built these laboratory information systems already where we're receiving Resulting specimens storing the specimens interface and laboratory equipment and we built data management systems This is prior to the data management systems and filing paper and All kinds of stuff like that for the research clinics that we were currently working with But paper is very difficult to work with and if you're dealing with large trials you start to trip over it It's bulky. It's hard to change state. It can't be validated in real time. You need to transcribe information which has a Fixed sort of 10% error rate. You've got to store the paper and then when you want to do quality assurance Or you're trying to prepare for Some sort of interim or final analysis. You've got to drag those papers back out and make corrections send them back to the clinic Then get them back into your data center transcribe them again store them and this process just goes on forever and it turns out that What'll happen is you get to some point in your trial You want to do analysis and you can take eight to twelve months to prepare a data set and Very often these trials are underfunded. You ask for ten dollars. You get six Kind of things so no matter what you cannot afford to have these long lag times For data preparation and when you get to the end of a trial, you're probably out of money already anyway So having to say oh, we need another 12 months of staffing to work on a data set It's not going to be something you want to do plus you got a lot of pressure to publish to Because that is in some ways the main deliverable. So in 2010 I introduced to my team Python and Django I looked at other things, but I decided to do that and we then got underway to develop Basically data collection that we would do at point of care and Our main metric was to say okay if We say you want to freeze a data set for analysis How long is it going to take from that moment to the point where we can actually do a fine do an analysis? And we got that down from that eight to twelve month thing down to in our last one just a couple weeks So we tried this system out on one trial we called the Mabana trial This was looking at trying to completely block transmission from a mother to a child. It was a successful trial We were able to show do that but it was We deployed this within clinics our research clinics So it's a very comfortable turf and we had control of the environment We were able to install connections and data connections and so on but then we had another trial Which was just a small one which we did in a neighboring village where we? Where we had to go into people's households that actually is a picture of somebody's household and That was different because now it's not our turf. We're actually operating in somebody's house kick us out and we can't sit there anyway, and there wasn't good data connection there and We the group tried to do this on paper and within a few weeks about six weeks the whole thing collapsed because the Handling the paper just became a nightmare You're collecting longitudinal data. You're collecting data from one household over a number of days And it just it just became a nightmare. So we had to stop the trial and finish and kind of come up with another solution The solution was our first iteration of offline use. We had learned something already from Making from the Mabana trial with how to do electronic data connection and data collection In management and we tried some offline use then in 2012 We got a grant for about the large grant about 80 million us which You don't see that much on the ground, but that was the total apparently And since it was so large State Department and CDC got involved as well The trial brought together a lot of what we as data managers or our data manager team already had experience in now We knew how to do real-time data collection real-time validation We knew how to do the sort of the informed consent process how to handle HIV testing data treatment data How to do blood collection chain of custody? and all kinds of Questionnaires for men women and so on Regulatory compliance how to protect personal information through encryption and things like that. We knew how to do all this but This trial was different in that It wanted we wanted to operate in 30 extremely remote villages with distances of I'll say kilometers, but you know 700 kilometers away and things like that from where we were we were sitting So this is a different This is different So what was the current state of internet in Butona at that time? So in 2009 3g was introduced but they just focused on the major city centers and The amount of bandwidth that they could actually handle on those 3g connections is pretty poor It's more mostly about like Facebook Twitter that kind of thing not really trying to do anything And they're always really lopsided you can bring a lot of data in but you can't push data up So you would prefer something symmetrical, but fixed line penetration It's only about 10% in the country. So that's also no good The cost of a gigabyte around 70 dollars per gigabyte. So that's pretty heavy We weren't really sure what kind of data throughput we would have And so we also looked at satellite Like five dollars a megabyte or something like that But there's also the complexity of dealing with satellite because we were thinking in terms of trying to do something in real time Because that's what we were working with we had these systems that work really well But they were online. So we wanted to see if we could work with real time I put into the budget a pretty big trying to work with this five bucks megabyte satellite thing, but when we started to have discussions And the cdc moved in they said oh by the way this internet budget Can we remove that because we need that money for something else I had a lot of arguments a lot of people to explain that you know, no matter what anybody tells you 3g is not going to support this Anyway time went on into 2013 and 30 days before we We started the trial we had already written our solution to operate sort of offline They decided oh my gosh because they have a component of the trial that they were responsible for They wanted internet So they suddenly came up with a lot of money and started helping us put up Towers like this And we would we had 30 villages. They were two uh two um, we're doing a Comparative trial. So we had a control and uh any intervention sites and we would so there's 15 and 15 So we go two sites at a time and we built these Right before we got to the next pair. These were being built and so we walked along the country like this But these connections as expensive as they were We put a half a million dollars into building these or they did And and recurring costs of like $50,000 But we're looking at one megabit per second is all we could sustain Which is okay for ssh and things like that, but it was one megabit Hopefully a lot of most of the time during the day was unusable And if only at night could it be usable so it's still not a solution to real-time data collection So what did we do? So all we really are doing we came up with an offline solution and it's pretty simple I'm not spoiler alert. There's no magic to not having internet. You don't have internet You don't have internet or you don't have a data connection Wi-Fi. There's no solution to that But you know through asynchronous sort of approach you can you can come up with something So we're using Django systems and so we've got database if we can First thing we do is we would we wrote some a little bit to We added to each of our system a a new model an outgoing transaction model as a single model And then we would also have an incoming transaction model sort of taking a almost like mail inbox outbox and all of the models within Within the system for each of the questionnaires and forms and so on would all serialize into us each time You would hit a save method. They would think serialize into an outgoing transaction That transaction at some point would be all those transactions at some point coming out of that outgoing transaction model Would be dumped into a file The file then when we had some availability of some sort would be scp'd across to a remote machine which would and then Reverse it read the file back in D serialize all the transactions and everything works and as long as we maintain the order of how they played out Originally and then just play them back. Everything is fine So what we had were In some cases we would have 30 or 40 research assistants fan out into a village each one has a mac air They would go out for about four hour shifts because they're also collecting blood They have to come back with their blood to what we had was a community server Which is still not connected to any remote system They would connect to a local wi-fi. We had a little wi-fi unit right there and they would connect to a mac book push in all Move in all of their transactions and At some point maybe in the night or in a few days that community server would do the same thing And push all its transactions to a headquarters server So Let's look at some some code So we have an installable application jango collect offline Which seems these are jango applications you would Put in your install app you migrate you'll get those two tables the outgoing transaction table on the incoming transaction table or model Those models simply have one field for the the serialized JSON and then some metadata for the administration around that that transaction and The incoming Model is exactly the same I'm just on the other end So to prepare a model for offline use if you have a model like This one I think is a jango tutorial or something like that Um, I just added a report date times. We're always using that and I have my own little a utility package which uses uh I'm always working with um time zone aware dates and for that Anyway, then you have because you're going to serialize you have to have a unique constraint on at least one field or combination of fields Um, I was just going to say for the um date time stuff. I use the arrow package would recommend that So now and this is pretty much you can follow this pretty well in the and well described in the Django documentation. You're preparing a model for serialization. So you have to add Well, what we did was we would make sure we would switch from a integer primary key to a uuid So we wouldn't get any clashes and That's now Has become part of Django. So you can use that but previously it wasn't um add a custom managers Plus the natural key so you can do the full circle of serializing and deserializing So that would be a model and this will weaken you can also Add foreign keys or in Django. You have the sort of mini to mini. I don't know how many people are familiar with Django So it'll support all that kind of stuff Then the next thing is to um Add a offline models module in your app And that's just where you're going to register which models you want to Include in this process. You don't have to include every model Um, you can either register them explicitly In that offline models py or you could Be safer if you want the whole application and all its models to to um To be a part of this then you just register with the the app name And That module will be discovered on boot up just like if you're familiar with Django. Django has an admin um Has admin classes and when you boot up the system looks for an admins py and registers any classes in there This uses the same the same approach some of the same code So that as soon as you boot up it'll look for that and it have a um, A global site offline global that will you can refer to later in registry And then the last thing is some sort of post-save signal. So once every time you For any model that's registered if you say that It's going to inspect to see if that model By name is registered In the global and if not, it'll just raise an exception and pass or if it is Then it's going to fire this uh two outgoing transaction method And it will then serialize it and stick it in that outgoing transaction table Um, we also encrypt it for security purposes Um as you should Yeah, so that takes care of Everything that's happening on a client machine and everything that will happen in reverse on some remote server and The next thing then is to handle the sort of file events what's going to happen there So that process is started by One of our research assistants with their machine. They have a we had several different interfaces So but it's basically just click and then that will export all those outgoing transactions into a file And then we use a um a module called watch dog Which will just monitor a um a directory for any events We had used this for some of the laboratory equipment that would drop Uh result files and just pick them up and pull them into a database. So this worked well here as well And any sort of event you just pass it um an event handler. This is just some simple code coming from the Um from its own documentation So we had different event handlers one was to um Export the outgoing transactions to a file another one would be to transfer files to a remote system So the file is created and then it can move to the remote system And another one would be that as soon as a remote system file gets dropped into a directory It then pulls it up into the incoming transaction model So that takes care of database file get it across Into get the file across and then pull the file up there So the watchdog is on a community server or it'll be on the final node however many you want to have but we only ever had client community server and then headquarters server and then obviously on the last database or whatever not the last one but The incoming there would be a post-save signal that would then deserialize all your models as I described earlier so That's kind of it.  So This is actually some people working in the field so you can see them with their little mac air there They actually came with the table and the chair and the cd4 counter and all the equipment to collect blood and Coolbox and everything they they would had everything with them as they were going in They have some discussion They collect the blood like that They pack it all up and and walk away And this whole process with the data collection the blood collection everything like that and the testing The counseling and everything that they could take up to an hour hour and a half And in some cases we would have families of like 10 because old ladies would tell all their relatives to come because they're they're coming to to participate in the research then We had trucks like this which were our data center and laboratories. So when Sorry when he Finishes then he goes to this truck. This is parked next to our laboratory But this would be parked also in the field And we have a laboratory there for him to bring in his blood specimens. They would then be processed spun down The data would be Synchronized into our data center, which is just on the other end of the truck The lab technician would then see the data on the server that they're accessing Scan in the physical The physical specimens to verify everything's okay Then the research assistant will go back out to the next household and we're basically done And then up here we had a little wireless bridge that would connect in some way to That tower that you saw earlier when the connection was available and the data would end up Where we wanted it So we did exactly that Across 30 villages for four years. We collect serialized find working internet transfer deserialize this whole process and we did our first Enrollment in october of 2013 and got our first publication out in 2016 to show that but so on I actually Had the best Program available Except I think switzerland might have beat out with their 0.1 percent prevalence In the worlds Yeah, and that's it. That's what we did. So thank you


Okay, so this one from the other day says, write a radical mechanism to form the most stable monochlorination product for the following compound. And then it says methylcyclobutane. So I want you to draw the mechanism for this reaction. So remember, methylcyclobutane is that compound there. If you couldn't figure that out, make sure you can do that. And I want you to do the reaction by chlorine plus light to get the product. Okay, so what's the product here? Does anybody think of that? Where should the chlorine be? The word squared null. Yup, that's right. But you didn't know that? Make sure you're on your game tomorrow or whenever we're taking the quit. Okay, so that should be the product. And those of you who know how to do this, well know that that should be the product. Okay, so the mechanism, that's different. Okay, that's just showing what the product is. Let's draw the mechanism. But this is kind of like what you were doing. So, to erase all of that business, we know where we're going. And then we know where we're starting. So, I like to remind myself that there's a hydrogen there. Remember, the most stable hydrogen is the most substituted hydrogen. The most stable radical is the most substituted radical. So, if we look at the substitution patterns of these potential radicals, we'll see that's the primary, secondary, secondary, secondary tertiary. So clearly it's going to go on the tertiary curve. So the first step, of course, is that the chlorine atoms break. And if you're not drawing fishhook arrows at this point in time, then you're not drawing it properly, okay?  Remember, those show the motion of one electron. The first step of the reaction, of course, is making the two chlorine atoms, or if you prefer to call them radicals, which they are. They're actually chlorine atoms. So now one of those high-energy chlorine atoms is going to come and extract that hydrogen in there. Because, remember, we want to make the most stable radical. So it's going to happen. And then the two fishhook arrows go like that. And then the other one go like that. And we were saying that tertiary radical, most stable, since it's going to be the most stable, that's where the monochlorination is going to go. Yeah, we have another chlorine atom, but that's probably doing something else. So it's probably another chlorine molecule at this point in time. If you use the chlorine atom, I wouldn't mark you wrong, but you're probably not doing it correctly. So that's going to give you the product there, and then another propagation step so that other chlorine could keep propagating the reaction. So that gives us the monochlorinated product. Like I was saying, we still have another chlorine atom.  Any questions on that one? Pretty straightforward, right? Wonderful.


Well, let me begin. Let me begin by introducing the program and welcoming you all to the future in terms of work. I'm very glad to see you and hopefully hear from you all today. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the former creator, co-host, and chief editor. Wow, I really am very, very glad to meet you once this week's guest. Michael Roth is the president of Wisney University in New England. He is one of the leading presidents in the higher education space. He's a leader as well in liberal education space. On top of that, along with me, he's a humanist who has produced a whole series of books. He's a fantastic teacher, an innovator, and a teacher with technology, and just one of the brightest people in higher education. I'm delighted that you can make time to join us and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. Welcome, President Roth. Thank you, Brian. Happy to be here. Oh, I'm really, really glad to be here. Let me just begin by asking you the question I asked everybody on this program. I just introduced you to some of your titles and some of your background and some of your output. Let me ask this question. Looking ahead to the next academic year, what are the big topics, the big ideas that are going to be the top of mind for you? Well, in my case at Westland, the topics that are coming to the forefront have to do with issues of affordability, making sure that the students we bring to Westland are able to get the most out of their experience there because they have full access to the resources of the institution and acquire little debt or no debt while attending school. I'm also very interested in the continued development of programs that cut across departments and as I've told my department chairs at Westland again and again, if I had my way I'd get rid of all the departments but as they tell me, you won't get your way. Because I do think the most exciting work is often usually done between departments or with interdisciplinary collaboration. So we're continuing to explore how to build interdisciplinary collaborations of an unexpected sort which bring our scientists and artists together or people interested in education and politics. And for the next year, I have to say that I am wrestling with the issue of how to create a proper vehicle so that our students can participate in the next election cycle, which I think is of such great importance. And so we say like many liberal arts schools that we think that civic preparedness is a fundamental aspect of liberal education. And I find myself asking the question of like so given the extraordinary importance of the coming election in a year from now, what are we doing as an institution to empower our students to participate, not just going to vote, absolutely important, but between now and that day when they vote to actually work on campaigns in places where they may make a difference. You know, some students who are in various political parties are, of course, we're not going to steer them one direction or another, but I think it's really important for us to find ways as an institution to help students engage at a level that's beyond testing something on campus or advocating for change on campus. That's also, you know, as important, but the national level in the next year or so will actually create a very different context for everything else we do, depending on how things work out. So I am working hard with some of the people at Wesleyan who do this all the time to think about how we can energize our students to spend time in swing states or work on local elections or however they want to do it, but to really get involved at this moment in American democracy and to make a difference and to learn from that involvement in ways that inform the rest of their lives. That's a tremendous call. I have all kinds of questions on it, but before I pounce, let me just remind everybody, all of you participating, that this event is for you to ask your questions and to ask your comments. So if you'd like to ask President Roth about voting or about interdisciplinary work, in fact, we already had a comment in one of the chat boxes, Michael, which was innovation happens in the interstices, which is quite true. You know, I'd love to hear your questions and thoughts. So again, either just click the raised hand button so that I can beam you up on stage or type in a question in the text box. A quick question about the last point. Is a Connecticut, has the government made any efforts to either enhance or retard student access to voting next year? No, I think the, you know, that there have been, we just had an election yesterday, and actually a young Wesleyan alumnus was elected mayor of Middletown. And there was some grumbling from some citizens who think it's really not fair that students actually place such an important role. But I think that's no one's actually trying to prevent people from voting. Actually, they facilitated voting. And in town, the demonstration, not students, but just all the citizens of the city, skews in a certain way and some person with a Democrat nomination won, which is not the biggest surprise. He is quite young in his 20s still. And so that that was surprising. But I think for our students, what's interesting is they get to see that they can make a difference working on a campaign voting. We have a state representative, a state senator named Matthew Lesser, who actually, I think he dropped out of school at some point thought he'd run for office.  And now, I don't know, it's more than a decade later, he's still in the state legislature now in the Senate. And he's an excellent legislator. I should say that one of the things that happens when an alumni finances these roles, they have to show that they are at least impartial. These of the university. So it's not as if we're getting somebody to do our bidding, not at all. But we are pleased to see how our young alumni can make have real success in the in the electoral system. Because that energizes participation. People not just running for office but working on campaigns. Last year we did micro grants over fall break during the midterm elections, giving people basically pizza and gas money to go and knock on doors and competitive races, various places in the country.  And of course, when you knock on doors of campus, you discover people with much wider range of views than you might fight on campus. And I think that was just educational for them. And I think, again, our job is not to give them four years of campus politics, which then stay as an isolated object of nostalgia when they graduate, but actually give them the habits of participating in the civic dimension in the public realm, which they can continue to do after they graduate. That's terrific. I have questions before I could say anything. Our wonderful forum crowd has its own questions. Okay, just flash a few of these up on the screen. I'll read them out loud. The first one is from the excellent Robert McGuire who asks, you mentioned full access for students when they are there. I suppose you mean affording to attend is just one part of the equation, right? And yeah, access after admission. It's a great question. And I have to say that I've been slower to recognize this than I wish I had been, that whether it's food insecurity or just not understanding, let's say how to get an internship or other things that affect student performance. And I think it's Professor Jack who's at the Harvard School of Education has written powerfully about this recently about his own experience at Amherst College as a low-income student, that there are many ways in which the college is a full scholarship plus room and board. It seems like a lot to the administrator, right? And it is a lot to the administrator. But to the student, if you're homeless when you're not in the dorm, that's a real problem. If you're working three jobs to send money home to your grandparents or your parents, that creates a different realm of issues. They won't even go to the infirmary when they're six. They don't know actually it's free. And I think I'll speak for myself. I didn't understand some of the nuances of that for a while. Now it's a challenge because America is today so unequal that you can't replicate the experience of a rich student for a poor student. Rich students are going to do a lot of things that a lot of people can't do. So we can't try to replicate that kind of privilege, but we can provide access to the tools that provide students upon graduation with access to economic mobility and meaningful work. That's a very, very thoughtful, sensitive answer. Thank you, Robert. That was a terrific question. If you want to follow that up, Robert, please let us know. We have another question from the awesome Steven Ehrman who asks, to encourage more interdisciplinary teaching and research. What steps are you taking? You're considering. And then he follows us up by saying he's asking about sustained interdisciplinary work, not just interdisciplinary projects. Great question, great question. You know, Wesleyan has a long history of interdisciplinary work going back to the 1950s and they set up colleges of social studies and letters way back then where people would be not just encouraged, but really required to teach outside their fields. There's a lot of team teaching. The departments were broken down into these interdisciplinary units. And those are going strong. So when I came as president in 2007, I thought the best way to commemorate the 50th anniversary of these colleges was to create a new college. So we did. We created the college of the environment under the direction of a biologist Barry Chernoff. Barry had in mind that everybody in the college and the environment would have an environmental science major plus another major. So it could be environmental science plus economics or government or anthropology or dance or music or film. And then he would bring these people together in a research environment when they get to be juniors and seniors with an outside scholar and also faculty would give them release time to work on projects together. And it goes from carbon taxes and the economics of that kind of policy to landscape painting. I mean, each year is a little different. And you get people who normally don't talk about their work together to talk about their work together and to try to write something together or produce a performance. And as also to let them continue their own work, let's say in economics, not bought by these broader conversations. So you may sustain money. It's not a secret. You need to get money so that these programs aren't an afterthought. And so what I try to do is raise money for centers and programs so that faculty and students know where the resources are. And my sense is, generally speaking, it's not always the case, but generally speaking, departments function by seniority. The oldest person gets the resources. Interdisciplinary programs function by who has the best idea. And that to me is coming from a design in art school in California before we're saying that that's the way to do it. You want to get people the possibility of iterative work because they have a good idea, give them resources, see what happens, and then start over next year with another team. So we created the College of the Environment. Now we added three more interdisciplinary colleges in the last five years or so, eight years, College of Film and the Moving Image, College of East Asian Studies, College of Integrated Sciences, and that's pretty interesting. Just tell me the difficulty of studying your own department. You manage the problems. So if you're doing genetics, you have to be doing some computer science, too. Or if you're doing molecular biology, you're likely to be doing things with chemists. And so we created the College of Integrated Sciences to give resources, research money advising to people whose work is, doesn't have to be squeezed into a department, but proudly wears the banner of multiple disciplines. And I think that I haven't had to steal the money away from the partners to do that, so they haven't been hostile to it. And I think people have seen the proof in the pudding. They've seen that good work is coming out and they want more of it rather than retrenchment towards silos that are usually less interesting anyway. So a key piece of this is that you funded these new colleges externally to the pre-existing ones. Yeah, on the whole, that's the case. In College of the Environment, the faculty members actually have a very good fundraiser, too. Oh, nice. And we have a Center for the Humanities. It's been around since 1959 also. It was then the Center for Advanced Study. And in the early 2010s around there, they had an endowment. After 50 years or 350 bucks, somebody sold a painting and kept the money in a drawer, I think, in the director's office. And with the help of the Mellon Foundation, we were able to build a $6 million endowment. So we're a small place. That's enough money actually to provide a base of operations and experimentation. And I have to say, it's not like the president of the university should have any say in the content of these programs. And I don't. I go to the Center for Humanities regularly and I'm regularly annoyed by what's happening. And that's good, right? I'm supposed to be. As I get older, I'm getting more get off my lawn mentality. And it's great that they have an endowment with all seriousness because it doesn't depend on the people in the administrative chairs anymore. So once you create these funds, whether they're endowment or just long standing resources, you don't have to depend on the interest of the president or the provost or dean. You can really work with the active researchers and teachers in the field with the resources available to do this interesting stuff. That's an important point. Thank you. Thank you. For everybody else, let me just remind you that it's really, really easy to ask questions. And in fact, as I typed, as I said this, someone just added another question. If you would like to join us on stage, just hit the raised hand button. I can beam you on stage. In fact, speaking of which, we have a question from Leslie Harris. Just bring this up. It's from Bucknell. I'm wondering how these colleges interact with the existing departments. Do they offer team taught courses? Do they offer courses not already in the curriculum? Yeah, that's a great question. So it varies. They're not all the same. So the old ones, the College of Social Studies and the College of Letters, they have their own curriculum. But what they have in common is they're three-year majors rather than two-year majors, as most of our majors are. The people enter after their first year. And in at least, I think both cases, they don't have grades for a significant amount of time. They have outside examiners. And there's a significant amount of team teaching. In the College of Letters, there are faculty appointments specifically in that interdisciplinary program. And there have been for a long time. College of Social Studies, it's really the faculty culture of when it got started. The department said, every year, history will give someone to that college. And every year, philosophy will give someone. And predictably, that has not always gone smoothly. Sometimes people don't want to do it. Sometimes there's personality conflicts. But on the whole, it's worked well in the sense that the students get a cast of teachers who are predisposed into disciplinary work and have classes that otherwise did not exist in the curriculum. Right now in the College of the Environment, Charles Sebert, the New York Times writer and a journalist poet, is there working with a group of faculty and students on the ways in which non-human animals communicate. It's something he's worked on a lot.  And the things they come up with otherwise they wouldn't be there. In film, many of the courses were there already, but they were able to bring together a major and a minor under one roof and also include lots of people who are teaching film courses who are in the languages or in history or other places that were kind of just disparately scattered around the curriculum. So it varies a little bit. What all of these have in common is that they take seriously the function of what I call cohort building so that it's not just if I'm an economics major, I may have some friends in economics majors that may take some classes with them and not with others. But if I'm in the College of Letters, let's say, I actually take one class each semester and 15 people for my academic career, we take our exams together. There are all these bonding moments where you come together as an intellectual community. And I think that happens in film as well because everybody has to make a film and they're a junior or senior year and you can't make it by yourself. So if Brian's making a film, he needs somebody to carry the equipment and Roth will carry the equipment for Brian. But when I'm making my film, I'm gonna turn to Brian and say, what are you doing this weekend? And everybody crews for each other. And that creates a culture of collaboration which I think is really important to all of these interdisciplinary colleges. So it does expand the curriculum and it expands research opportunities for our students. Well, that just sounds fantastic. And yeah, I teach a digital video storytelling production and that's always, always collaborative. Speaking of collaborative, we have a few more questions that have just come in. And as always, once we get going, it's hard to stop. So let me just bring a longtime friend and supporter of the program, Tom Haynes from Texas. Let's bring him on stage. Hello, Tom. Can you see me or hear me? I can see and hear you. Hello. So question I have for you is that as you went into these new programs and these interdisciplinary programs, you're obviously, shall we say, forging new ground, plowing new fields. What kind of process do you have to figure out what's working and what's not? And how do you iterate? I mean, these sound like big ocean liner ships, not little speed boats. And so I'm always curious about organizational change. Yeah, that's a great question. So I think that we've been able to innovate with some instigation from the top, from the president's office, from me, and then some resources. And then I have to find hospitable faculty who actually think this is a good idea and not just interested in the extra, little extra money for two semesters. So in the college and the environment, Barry Chernoff had this idea. And when I did a call for, I did it when I started, it's a long time ago now, more than 12 years ago, I did a call to the faculty for new ideas. And I said I would pick, with some help of consulting with faculty and students, I would pick three or four things that we're going to work on for five years. And I always remember, faculty members said, what if my idea isn't one of those three? And I said, well, we're not going to do it. And she looked at me like I was insane. And I said, okay, I'm going to propose, I worked on Hegelianism for a long time. So I said, I'm going to impose the Hegelian Institute at Westland. And if it doesn't go, you can't raise money for it. No one at Westland can raise money for it. And this was a shock to some people. It seemed to me just a definition of what it means to have a priority. But for many people, they were under the illusion that they could go off and raise their money. And they didn't really do it, but it was an illusion. And it was really a distraction, I think, from getting stuff done. Once the college environment was up and running, people then came to see me say, oh, I'd like to do this. I'd like to do that. And I'd have to try to test the waters. I'll give you another example. It was both down and up. When I came from the California College of the Arts, very strong design programs and architecture program, and I was surprised Westland didn't have a design program. And the reaction I got made me think that the folks believed I was talking about had to decorate an office. And we worked very closely with IDO at CCA and other really interesting companies. I thought it was perfect for a liberal arts college. But when we went around and talked to faculty and I had a friend that I dispatched to do this, they were very reticent. They did not want to design an engineering. No, no, no, so I had to wait, actually. And I went around the country with talking to engineering pedagogues and talked to some design innovators who were all very encouraging. But it was when a younger group of faculty got tenure, and then I was able to get some grant money to do this, not a lot, just a little bit to see if it would work. Then suddenly a kind of guy in chemistry who said, well, actually, I do material science. I could teach that course. I usually teach it from ideas to projects. I could also teach it from projects to ideas. And I have a person in physics who said that. And then that person in design who said that. And suddenly we had our, you know, you only need a handful of people to get something started in a small place. Weston has 3,000 undergraduates, roughly. And so suddenly we, you know, it was five years of not happening. And then a little money, a few younger people getting tenure. And I think the example of these other colleges, now that's not yet a college. That's just a minor, but it'll be a major very soon. There's a lot of interest. And so I think that the change comes from, I think, having a senior administrator who actually want change, having faculty and something to open change, and having board and owners who trust the administrators enough to give them funds to try to see if something works. Then your question was also, how do you know it works? For me, it's enrollments, the production of new knowledge, whether it's exhibitions that get reviewed, positively, or papers that get accepted into scientific journals. And depending on the program, they should set the criteria for success when we start it. So that we know after a few years, whether it should be sunset or it should be extended. You all know this. I'm sure that at university, it's very good at starting stuff, not so good at killing things. And so we're trying to, be a little bit smarter about that, that not everything we start has to last. It could lead to something better, or it could just be, you know, you got a bad idea. We talk about encouraging failure. It means we have to fail sometime. Right. So I mean, that's the key with design is you have to know where to make that, where to make that left turn and understand and have the program be flexible enough to where you can go, well, this is working and this isn't. We are going to throw everything out, but maybe we need to make a slight realignment. You know, the thing of YouTube starting out as a dating service, right? Yeah. No, I think that's a really great point and helping faculty, especially the younger faculty, understand that pivoting is a good thing. You know, it's not a mistake necessarily that we encourage revision. Right. And that's a positive thing and trying to model that as well, to show that the administration is on their side. Actually, we're trying to do this in the same way. I mean, they don't really need my ideas. One thing a president can do is raise money in ways most faculty can't. So I'm conscious of the fact that I have ideas and I like my own ideas. I mean, but really, what I can do as a president is come back with some money to help people do their own ideas. Right. Well, speaking of ideas, we have another question coming in. Tom, thank you so much. That was a great question. Let me welcome Roxanne, one of the long-term funds in the program and also a fan of yours, President Roth. Yes, I am. Oh, my goodness, thank you. Hi. I was one of your students in your course, How to Change the World, a few years ago. I'm the Google Glass girl. I'm happy to see you and excited to ask you how I've changed the world and what are your thoughts on how technology can change the world as a university professor in a couple of ways with your faculty and your students. How do you feel that going forward with, you know, pedagogy and innovating virtual VR and artificial intelligence will affect us? Wow, great question. Sorry, guys. I didn't pack that up too neatly, but... No, that's a great question. So I'm afraid I don't have a great answer to that question, because I see my role really as enabling people who know a lot more about technology than I to experiment in ways that... Let me just use the phrase human-centered technological innovation, like human-centered design. I do think that AI underscores what should always be at the heart of a liberal education, which is not the exchange of information.  I learned about some art history.  Well, that's silly, because my phone can do that. And so what we wanted to be able to do is use technology to help create an environment in which students can use their imagination to ask questions that haven't yet been asked by either their faculty members or sometimes their fellow students. And sometimes that will come, I'm sure, though I'm sure only abstractly I haven't experienced these things, but with immersive technologies and with other forms of pedagogy that leverage the technology's ability to liberate the imagination. I put it that way because I do see, and I feel like just an old guy does know a lot here, but I do see that for many of my students technology is an excuse not to use their imagination. So they can, you know, depend on technology to get a quick answer or some information. So in my, I teach a rather large class now this semester on virtue and vice from Confucius to Spike Lee. And I ban technology in a classroom and I cold call on people and I'm like a very old fashioned in a way and I keep people on their toes in a face-to-face environment with 75 people. At least that's what my goal is and that doesn't always work. And I want them to be able to entertain ideas that they would otherwise find either irrelevant or insulting or outrageous to entertain those ideas and to, and by entertain I mean pay attention to them in such a way as to see clearly why other people find them so compelling. And that gives our students the experience of intellectual diversity. Now I know that technology can do that too or technology can facilitate that just by connecting people with different kinds of ideas but I do, I, you know, I kind of aim at intellectual diversity and the confrontation with difference as a vehicle for expanding one's imagination and insofar as technology can do that that's a wonderful thing because I do think changing the world in a positive sense will come from liberating the imagination giving people more access to compassion and care and more imagination about how to direct that compassion and care. Thank you. That's a fantastic, rich answer. I'm a mindfulness educator and co-temporary to mindfulness and I saw in one of the poetry and mindful books that you were referenced and talking about liberal education and the book that you wrote about why liberal education is important and how has that idea resonated with decreasing interest in liberal art at the university? That's a good question. So I'll try to just say quickly that about five or six years ago I wrote this book called Beyond the University Why Liberal Education Matters and I argued for what I just described which is that liberal education shouldn't be just you check off a bunch of boxes saying what you took but liberal education should develop habits of mind and spirit that allow you to pursue lifelong learning in a way that has an impact on the world beyond the university. I call the book Beyond the University because I always tell my students I don't care if you have a great time while you're on campus I do care that you leave the campus that you leave empowered as a W. Du Bois' word empowered to take what you've learned as a resource for future learning and do stuff beyond the university. I just published a book in the last few months called Safe Enough Spaces where I try to underscore how intellectual diversity and being open to challenge and leveraging free speech enables the kind of liberal education that I described in Beyond the University because I really think today there's a kind of wave of thinking that seems to indicate we don't have time for a broad education and we don't. The economy's too winners take all to allow for breath and context but what I see on the contrary actually is that the people have the big winners in this economy they go to these fancy schools where they have a very broad education they want their children to go to those places and so I see no reason not to have a pragmatic liberal education and not one where you just say I'm proud because I know what a Monet looks like but because I know how to use my education in the contemporary world a pragmatic, a pragmatist education that's based in breath and context and I want to argue for that because I do think that if we don't have such an education we actually will accentuate inequality we will condemn people to narrow or narrower lives because they've had a narrower education. That's a great difference. Thank you so much and when are you going to teach another course on Coursera? Are you going to teach another course? I love to teach on Coursera all students. You know what? What's been disappointing for me and this is a bigger subject is that Coursera used to really be cohort based I got to know the people who were going not all of them of course but some students going through the course at the same time so every morning I would look at my bulletin board and I see people who are reacting to things and as Coursera changed its business model they just became on demand everybody takes what they want to come and go and as a teacher I have little contact now with the community of learners or the student in the classes I'm disappointed but I haven't figured out what to do about my disappointment because those early days of MOOCs when everybody was some people hyping and others were despairing I actually was just saying it's a cool way to teach because I'm meeting all these people from all over the world who are seriously studying the stuff that I care about and helping me learn about it too but I feel like in recent years I have not I haven't found that same reciprocal learning that was there in the beginning and I should think more about how to deal with that Thank you so much Thank you Thank you, Roxanne That sounds like you heard it here there's a new need for a new kind of online class called maybe called the Roth MOOC If you're new to the forum if you haven't experienced this before bringing up guests like Tom and Roxanne is what we do that's that easy to join us for video Speaking of which, we had more questions came in and we had a few folks who couldn't make it here in person for schedule conflicts and they wanted to share some questions so let me just read these back This is one from the awesome Joellen Parker who asks How can liberal arts education best prepare students to understand the issues raised by big data, AI, and other digital forces? Well, I think an interdisciplinary approach is called for I think we have to understand the the way the technology works in some basic form and we have to understand how it has emerged from specific social and political conditions that privilege some kinds of markets and some kinds of privacy and foreclose others and I think we have to provide our students with the analytic tools to understand what's at stake when they participate in technologies that have access to intimate parts of their lives and when they think they're making use of a technology that may in fact be making use of them so I think liberal arts education shouldn't be technophobic in any way that it and it should be to we'll say again, as I said before to the last question to liberate or open the imagination I'll give you one example at Wesleyan we have a bunch of folks working on mapping projects with artificial intelligence and other forms of mapping that and visual representations of spatial relationships and networks that really show patterns that historians, sociologists and others just had and made visible before and they couldn't do that without the technology but the technology is very much in the service of the questions these scholars are asking rather than leading them only to ask questions that the technology lends itself to so I think that that seems to be a good path for integrating the breadth of liberal education with the tools that increase the power of one's analytic capacities I'd love to follow up on some of those mapping projects after this call, especially if any of those are publicly available. Sure thank you, that's a really powerful answer, it sounds like the way the digital humanities work we had a question from an author who was very excited to hear your on, this is William Moner who says that you had written a forward to an edited volume called redesigning liberal education and he says that in that forward you wrote about the pragmatism of Dewey, Adams and Du Bois and it makes him wonder whether and how the small liberal arts colleges can really connect back to those roots especially given the fierce and expensive competition for the four-year traditional student. Well I do think the affordability issue is really a big one and trying to attract students to any expensive college these days given the demographics is going to be increasingly challenging for schools I think our job is to figure out how to make the ideas of Adams and Jane Adams and John Dewey and Dewey and Du Bois how to make them as relevant as possible in the present, I do believe they are relevant and all three of those pragmatist thinkers would say that's our job, I mean we can't just say you should read John Dewey because John Dewey was great and he's important and he's not a Dewey in answer, we have to show what's vital and why it works and what's empowering about it I find the students I mean that's a pedagogical issue, you might say it's a marketing issue, I guess that would be to make it crass and in some ways it is a marketing issue but it's a pedagogical issue, I mean I teach this course of first year students, you know we start off with Confucius and we get on Aquinas and you know I know that's most of them that's not what they came, that's not why they're at school, that's not their thing and my job is to make this stuff seem very exciting to them and when I started teaching this kind of material 40 years ago or 35 years ago it wasn't so hard, not because the students were better or more open, it's just because I was closer to them in age and I understood them better and now that I'm a different relationship to them, I have to find other ways to make these thinkers real to them I do think they are real, I mean I think they are powerful and help us sort through some issues that face educators and institutions today but we have to show that the students are empowered by their time and university, I for one don't think there's any good reason to keep people at school for four years and I introduced a three year program at Wesleyan some years ago now but most people don't want it even though it saves them so much money people like being in college so my attempt it hasn't worked as well I thought it would but I think there we have to experiment with ways of giving people an authentic and powerful college education but outside of the eight semester framework I think that eight semester framework is purely convention and doesn't have any pedagogical grounding I think we may get past that I think so this is the first time anyone besides me has praised Jane Adams on this program so I just wanted to note that because it's a great thing then we had another question from the awesome Phil Katz this is kind of related to the previous question which is how do you make a non-elitist argument for the traditional liberal arts so the liberal arts should not should they do belong to everyone but there's a sense that they might not so how do you make the non-elitist argument for liberal arts belonging to everybody well that's what I try to do beyond the university I think it's a pragmatist argument so I with all kinds of college students and big publics community colleges high schools fancy schmancy places and I think it's the distinction is between the old argument of liberal arts as a canon that you kind of get to master or at least wear as a badge that you've read all that stuff you know that's not the argument for liberal arts that's going to work that is an elitist argument it just shows you I'm in the club I've read here's my play little bitch here's my Aristotle bitch and you know that's not I don't think it should work I think it should what should work is that the issues that the enduring questions that the philosophical tradition has wrestled with remain vital for people today and so giving some people a sense of context and political and ethical context for whatever they're interested in studying seems to be democratic so Dewey said you can have a liberal education approach to auto mechanics you can have a liberal education just as much as you can to piano I mean I took piano lessons in college it's very technical you know they weren't really interested in the history of the instrument I was just learning how to play chords and scales now a liberal arts approach or a liberal education approach would actually give you some sense of context of politics and ethics of history of geography and I think that giving somebody who's going to be an auto mechanic or a bartender or an operating machine in a factory would give you a sense of how what they do fits into a larger patterns in the world it's radically democratic because they deserve to know how they might think about where they sit in their world in relation to others just as much as some guy who doesn't have to work and could sit in a hammock and think about such things because someone who is unemployed by economy, redesigned by automation perhaps well it might be you might be unemployed because it's redesigned because of automation but I think saying that that person doesn't deserve or won't be interested in understanding how what they do fits into larger patterns whether those patterns include the arts or sociology I mean everybody will have their particular slant and of course some people won't care that's true but to imagine that most people don't care because they're dumb or something is not anti-elitist you know the absolute anti-elitist that's anti-democratic right there thank you thank you that's a really really good answer and I think that's a good forward looking answer as well we have one more question from a podcaster and speaker Michael Johnson who asks a very direct question looking forward again he says why do we need so many colleges and universities in America I think because we have so many different kinds of people in the United States and I think it's a strength of the U.S. education system at the tertiary level that there are so many different kinds of schools I think there isn't an American higher education system exactly because there's so many different kinds of places we may have more than we need you know we probably don't need these big for-profits that make money by just loaning money that's guaranteed by the government to students I'd love to see them eliminated but I'm sad to see a Marlboro college go I'm sad to see because I know kids and we all do that was a school that saved them that was a school that found their family their tribe whatever you want to call it and I think that you know rather than push put people through a cookie cutter finding ways to keep those schools vital and stop this corrupt support of these other institutions that the for-profit institutions that only exist as finance schemes to take federal dollars that are meant for loans and use them for tuition for people who never can complete their degree and if we had a decent department of education instead of trying to collect the money for those places they would close them down but instead of seeing these small colleges that actually have problems of economies of scale to be sure not getting the help they need to solve the economy of scale I mean that really is the issue for places like Marlboro and Hampshire unfortunately they walk up to the issue too late and maybe not so Hampshire I don't want to maybe they'll figure it out but it is really a hard problem but you know there are lots of enterprises in America that have figured out that the problem of scale and in relation to the possibilities of craft and whether that's on Etsy or whether it's in craft beer or bourbon I mean when I was growing up there seemed to be only a couple of handfuls of varieties of beer now they're a gazillion here might be of a certain spirit say why do we need so many kinds of beer I think it's wonderful now can you actually imagine an educational system that is I don't know if bespoke is the right word it might even be used by people but that is flexible and that is amenable to different kinds of students and that can be networked in a way to solve the problems of scale so that we can have individualized or nearly individualized education I'd love to see it I don't know how exactly to achieve it you can imagine a public system that had many small colleges that under the public realm rather than just these big mega universities with that you know are also hotel and football organizations but now I'm getting on track that's a fascinating idea so for UMass having what three campuses having you know say 15 and each one has a very very narrow focus the craft focus as you said and yet you network their procurement and their back of the house functions so that you can there really isn't a problem there but it's a problem that some enterprises manage to solve especially if the quality of what they do the education they produce is really high then you know I mean not all schools deserve to survive but there are many of them that do but they haven't had the kind of business help that will make them sustainable I see what you mean well that's a really rich answer a wide ranging answer and I can see that reflects a lot of experience you've had at the helm of Leslie for that question friends we're at the top of the hour we have about 90 seconds to go so the time has flown by I can see why your students admire you so much President Ross let me just ask people can keep up with you in a lot of ways on the screen there should be a couple of widgets for people to grab your most recent books because somehow as an instructor and as a president it's remarkable we can follow you on twitter which is emerald78 are those the best ways to keep up with you yeah I have a blog on the Wesleyan website as well oh great it's called rock on Wesleyan and so I gravitated towards twitter from the blog over the years and then there are those Coursera classes the modern and the postmodern and then which is two parts and then there's the how to change the world and you know those are free and easy to access via the Coursera platform if people are interested in those video lectures well thank you for those and that will give people a taste of what you're thinking and at the pedagogical level and the philosophical theoretical level um president thank you so much I really really appreciate your being here it's really generous of you to share your thoughts and it's been very very helpful for I think all of us thank you very much well thank you it really was a pleasure such good questions and I'm grateful that you included me of course absolutely thank you now don't go away friends I have to introduce you to what we're doing next week because we never stop moving we always have more things coming up so next week we have we shift grounds to talk about the flip classroom and how the flip pedagogy can work best we have a math professor from Grand Valley State University Robert Talbert who'll explain his learning and showing us what he discovered in his most recent book now if you want to also check out some of our previous programs you can just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive and look back over the next four years if you want to keep talking about everything that President Ronald has described everything from your disciplinarity to the future of liberal education to how small colleges can survive and large colleges change we're all over social media so just head to our groups on LinkedIn and Facebook join our Slack channel or just join us on Twitter in the meantime thank you all for being such a great community these wonderful questions and a great lesson. Bye bye.


TfNN, headline news update. Good afternoon everybody, I'm Tommy O'Brien, coming to you live from TfNN headquarters in St. Petersburg, Florida, one PM Eastern time on Monday, three hours left to go on the trading day and we got markets in positive territory. NASDAQ leading away up 127 points, trading at 75-35, you get the S&Ps up 27 points or about a full percent, trading at 27-74 and the Dow, after being pretty dramatically in negative territory, mostly all to do with the Boeing news that they, of course, in the negative territory, but the Dow nonetheless positive 82 points, trading at 25-532, will start this off this morning and let's jump over to Boeing because they are quite a mover in the Dow and they have had some volatility, Boeing, down about 7.1% today, that's $29, we'll call it $30 below where it was at Friday, but nonetheless, $365 was the low, so you're almost $30 above that range and we almost made it to 400, as we made it at 1.398.77. We'll see that shake out throughout the trading day and to jump back, some of the news shaping that, of course, unfortunately, the tragedy over the weekend where you had an Ethiopian Airlines flight going down, the Boeing 737 MAX-8, that's the second time that that vehicle has gone down in the last six months, but nonetheless, you have U.S. Airlines trying to calm nervous travelers after that fatal crash, you have China suspending their travel with the Boeing 737 MAX, Ethiopia, Indonesia as well, but the U.S. Airlines holding strong to put back some of that context to get down, so there's Southwest, they have the biggest fleet of 737 MAX-8 aircrafts, 34 as of the end of last year and they are out there saying they remain confident in the safety and airworthiness of our fleet of more than 750 Boeing's, well guess what, Southwest, we're not really worried about the other 716, we're worried about the 34 737 MAX-8, it's not to chuckle, but pretty pretty ironic to see that type of a reaction. American Airlines talking about that waivers are not available, non-refundable fare, as do the majority of passengers and so no refunds, none to the likes, and American just saying if you have questions, give us a call, this is gonna play out, we'll see, so nonetheless, jumping back to the futures, there's your Dow, hanging up here at these highs, 25, 580, we'll jump through the indices, quite a run for the S&P, 27, 79, NASDAQ 100, quite a chart, 71, 68, we've got Crude, 56, 63, there's your gold contract at 12, 91, 75 and the Euro, 1232. Stay tuned, Steve Rhodes coming up right now with the Trader's Edge, Dave Wighted Tube, Tom O'Brien at three. Have a great Monday, everybody.


Culmination, in observational astronomy, the culmination of a celestial object the sun, the moon, a planet, the star, or a deep sky object or constellation is either of two moments when it reaches the observer's meridian on the celestial sphere, on which it appears to move along the circular path over. The course of a day, due to Earth rotation. As viewed from the surface of a tristral body, except its geographic poles, a celestial object passes through the meridian twice a day, once at its upper culmination, when it reaches its highest point is viewed from a given location on Earth, and once at its lower culmination, when it reaches its lowest point. The term culmination is often used to mean upper culmination.


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