Felly, mae'n gulio'r 25rhyw gyrfaethol Fawr i'w melyddoch chi i chi ddweud i campaignhau a'r 2020-23. The apologies have been received from Beatrice Wishart and Jim Fairlie. I welcome Christine Grahame to the meeting whose attending is a substitute. Karen, Rhoda and Christine are all participating remotely this morning. It gives us all a bit more elbow room. Be ffo'r wygέn, rwy'n caill i'r mwyaf cyflawn ei ffasciaeth y pwylliant, ond rwy'r Fy modaig y First Item of Business on consideration for consent notification for three UK Si's. That Planto Protection product's Miscellaneous Amendments Regulation 2023, official controls established lists Regulation 2023, and Citis Anitory Conditions Amendment No 2, Regulations 2023. Do any members have any comments on any of the notifications? No. Are members content to agree with the Scottish Government's decision to consent in the provision set out in the notifications being included in the UK rather than Scottish subordinate legislation? The committee will now consider the first EU law tracker report. This report was commissioned by the Constitution European External Affairs and Culture Committee to provide an analysis of developments in the EU law and a Scots law. The intention is that this would enable the Scottish Parliament to monitor the Scottish Government's commitment to regulatory alignment, and there is an expectation that subject committees will consider each EU law tracker report. The clerk set out the four case studies that relate to our committee, the rural affairs and islands remit, and proposes the committee rights to the Scottish Government to ask a number of questions. Do the members have any comments on the EU law tracker or reports? No. Are you content that the clerk is writing a letter to the Scottish Government with a number of questions? That concludes our business in public. We will now move into private session, and I suspend the meeting for a short comfort break.


If the diagnosis is cancer, time is important. Call the PMC Lawson Cancer Center and we'll see you quickly with the goal of starting your plan of care within two weeks of diagnosis. Our purpose is saving lives. Pikeville Tourism and Downtown Pikeville will be hosting Small Business Saturday, November 26th from 11 to 5 p.m. Over 500 downtown dollars will be available to win and the first 200 shoppers will receive 10 downtown dollars for free. All the local businesses are participating, we're having, it starts at 11, we're having red bags, giving them out for free. In the bags will be 10 downtown dollars that you can spend anywhere downtown so it's free money basically but we're limiting that to the first 200 people to come and get those and that will be available at the shops 225. In addition to shops, Small Saturday, Pikeville will be hosting a variety of other events to kick off the holiday season. There's much more to do, we're going to have a storybook walk with Frosty the Snowman, he will be there, that starts at 2 and 4 p.m., we're going to have two different ones and we're also having carriage rides downtown, ice skating will be available and then we're going to have our tree lighting at 5.30 so there's going to be a lot going on downtown so make sure if you don't want to come to shop small that's fine but make sure to come out to at least one of our events is coming Saturday. For a full schedule of events, visit Pikeville Tourism on Facebook. For Mountaintop News, I'm Brianna Robinson.


And I increasingly frustrated with what, what the lack of action or so from the politicians, what's going on here. In this upcoming talk, Teodor is going to tell us how data science can try to find what points, what pain points need to be addressed with priority. And I'm really looking forward to hearing this, because I think this is going to affect all of our lives. Over to Teodor. Thank you very much for this kind introduction, Sifu. Yeah, good evening. I heard that I'm the last talk of the day here, so I'm not going to be extra quick, but I'm not going to be extra long either. Before I start, though, I would like to know a little bit about you. So I'm going to ask you some questions, and I would like to have some answers from you just by a show of hands. So who of you does self-identify, maybe, as a hacker? Who of you does? So those are like some. Okay, thank you very much. Who of you works with larger amounts of data, or would call themselves data scientists? So that's most of the guys here and the people in here? Perfect.  Okay, so that's... And who of you is in none of these categories? Wow. Okay, that's also quite a much. So my name is Theo Rosch-Berlea, I'm right now doing a PhD in Marburg, where I also studied. I studied biology and focused on the genetics of microorganisms. And now I'm doing a PhD in bioinformatics, and I'm studying ecology of the lake microbiome. To let me start, let me tell you a story. The story begins 4.5, 4.4 billion years ago, when Earth started to be cold enough, so that water could start to accumulate in first oceans, foreign. Shortly thereafter, amazingly, shortly thereafter, the first form of life emerged. We know this, or we assume this because 3.5 billion years ago, some billion years ago later, we find the first fossil evidence of similar celled organisms. Not like this, but this is the only creative commons image I found, which looks nice enough for microorganisms. They are hard to give an image to. So these first forms of life emerged, and with this it started a new age, or a new way of things developing. Because right from the get-go, you had a process of change and adaptation, of mutation, of diversification, which then emerged from that. So through evolution, as we call it, you have a diversification and life starting from single, simple cells, or something like this, started to diversify and conquer all of Earth. First the watery terrains, and then got more diverse and more special than the land and the air. And every niche that is available, every way of living that is thinkable, or not even thinkable, but rather possible, is currently more or less there is something, some organism that lives that way. And this went on and on, and organisms changed, and some of them look rather scary, some of them looked rather nice. We know all of this from fossil evidence, so we dug in the ground and found some fossils or something, and looked at it, and we said, oh well, it must have looked like this. But from time to time what happened, and what happened five times in Earth's history, was a catastrophic event called mass extinction, where 75 to 90 percent of all species went extinct in a blink of an eye. The most well-known of this is the last one that happened that killed the dinosaurs, which happened through meteorite, as I think most of you know, right? So this ended the age of the dinosaurs, but then also this enabled something else to happen, which is that every time such an extinction event happened is that new forms of life could have used that space that was freed through the extinction to foster. The extinction events usually, again, I told you, 75 to 90 percent killed almost everything. Some things were left behind, so when the age of the dinosaurs ended, the age of the mammals started. This is a rather late picture for mammals, but there were a lot of different mammals before that. Also the age of the birds started, but common birds. So the age of the mammals then led to, well, the age of the mammals then directly led to the age of the humans, the Anthropocene. This is a very special age in geological terms, because it's the first time that a single species shapes the whole face of the earth. When it said the age of the dinosaurs, it was dinosaurs, not a single species of dinosaur, but now it's just us. And what we're doing is we're building crazy stuff. When you came here, you have either used a car or a train or a plane or maybe a boat, I don't know, but you used a lot of infrastructure and things that were built and created by us, which no other species really does to this extent. And what we're doing by this is we're changing, again, the face of the earth, a lot of the land that is surrounding us. We're building cities, large cities, that remove all the living, most of the living species from that land at all. We create streets that cut through forests or plains and separate biomes and species, and by that we reduce their gene pool and make them more likely to go extinct. We're using plastics, which are, by natural physical forces, turned into microplastics, and those are all over the planet. We, of course, also produce a lot of CO2 and create a climate change that is man-made and is a lot of problem. I'm not going to talk about climate change here. I really want to stress that, because these are linked problems, the problem we have with ecology now and the climate change problem, but they're different, nevertheless. Also something very interesting, and I don't know what you thought about this, is the amount of light we produce, which really changes a lot of processes in nature, because usually light was only there at day, and then we create a lot of light in cities at night. This really changes everything, kind of. What we in a certain sense do is we take ecosystems, and out of these we create techno systems. We remove everything that is ecological about them. Actually, when you think about it, in your house, in your room, this is an ecological ecosystem-free zone. You only want those organisms in your house, in your room, that you put there. If there's something else, a spider or something, you really think about killing it just to get rid of it.  This is what we do to a big part of Earth. But I might ask you, is this a problem? So what we know, we don't know a lot. There's a lot we don't know. But one thing that we know is, for example, what you might have all heard in the last year or two years ago on the radio, no, actually, last year, not in 2019 yet, but soon will be in 2019, then this will be in two years, two years ago. So over the last 27 years, the insect biomass in Germany was reduced by 75%. This means when you take a box and you go through the air and you collect all the insects that you can find there and you put them on the way, this will weigh 75% less than 27 years ago, if you have done the same thing. This, of course, is only one publication, but more and more publications confirm this finding. And now you might think, if we are reducing the amount of insects so radically, this might have an effect on other organisms. And we see something like this for birds and for plants, of course, flowering plants. But actually, we see this in all species, all kinds of animals. So in the last 100, 200 years, extinction rates rise rapidly. This means that organisms that were there before, species that were there before, are not out there anymore, either extinct completely or extinct in the wild. This should, I think, really worry us. Because the question now is, how close are we as a source for an extinction? To those mass extinctions I told you earlier. And this is quite close. This is a nice figure that I found somewhere and had to redo it. Just look at the, for example, the Mamalia. Those are mammals, reptiles, some of the names you can understand. But the most important thing here is that the space from the bars to the red line, which would then qualify as a mass extinction, it's not that big anymore. And I hope you can see that this will only rise. So scientists are now arguing, and they're actually not really arguing, but they're coming together to the idea that human beings, human kind, might be the next, the sixth mass extinction. So we are as bad as this meteorite that killed all the dinosaurs. How do you feel about that? I don't know. Actually, I don't think that I'm telling you much new here. And I think I need to tell you this anyway to refresh your memories, because this is our motto, right? And then the other thing is that we need to frame it. On purpose I didn't put many images of cute looking animals in here, but rather took the part of the data. And what I found most interesting when I prepared this talk, I thought about the movies I saw in the last years, and so many of these movies actually are about this problem. And it's not only about amazing beasts and where to find them, where a guy goes out to save as many animals as he can, but even the bad guys in our movies are doing this somewhat better than us. When you think about the last Avengers movie, Thanos really tries to save ecology by killing half of it. That's a bad idea, but at least he wants to try it. And I don't know whether we are at that point yet, at the point that Thanos is about. And what's even more problematic, I think, you know the Deutsche Bahn, most of you, and this Deutsche Bahn has a magazine, and the last issue of the magazine has this issue on its cover. So if the Deutsche Bahn knows about a problem and really wants to put something on it, we really should do as well. So let me get some, please clap on so that I have some time to drink. Water tastes so much better when someone is clapping. And so to get more into it, I would just now want to talk about what an ecosystem, how we can think of an ecosystem, not really what an ecosystem is. So for you computer scientists and data scientists and so on, you know networks, right? So you can think about an ecosystem as a network. You have nodes, which might be animals or species or groups of species, and you have interactions between them. Here I have a very simplified version of this because of two reasons. On the one hand, it's quite hard to fit a very detailed network on this slide and I won't be able to tell you about it because it's too detailed. On the other hand, it's because we don't know it for many ecosystems in a very fine detail. So I just put some plants in there, algae, insects, fish, and so on and so on. And I put only two kinds of interactions, positive ones and negative ones. I hope you forgive me for this simplification. So this ecosystem is a network and it behaves somewhat like a chaotic system, somewhat in some other senses it does not. So it's not really the case that a small change in input. So no, oh well, I don't know really. But it might be the case that a small change in an input leads to a drastic change in the output. But what's even clearer is that you have a sense of robustness in these systems. So you can change most of the parameters for quite some and it doesn't really break. But then if you make more changes, this system will break. So this is a lake ecosystem most of all because I study lake ecosystems. And I don't really study the whole lake ecosystem, but only the small part on the left bottom of this. And I just want to go to this a little bit more because we don't really know. I don't know, I never know what I should say. We don't know anything, but we know next to nothing about this. We know that there are a lot of organisms in there abbreviated with Greek letters. And we know that there are a lot of abiotical factors that have something to do with these bacteria and that interact. And that bacteria, certain bacteria can only live with certain abiotical factors. But we don't really know many of the interactions there. But let's go back to our ecosystem and let me tell you some, to give you some idea of how these ecosystems are getting worse Let me go through three ways of disrupting an ecosystem. For example, what you could do is you could put too much nitrate on your acre. And this nitrate will get into the rivers and get into the lakes and the seas. And this will lead to a lot of nutrients, which you could think that it is a good thing because for your plants on your acre, it is a good thing. But on the lake, in the lake, if there are too many nutrients, this will lead to a lot of growth for algae and plants. And these algae and plants will then, on the one hand, reduce the amount of light that goes into your lake in the lower parts of your lake and the amount of oxygen that is available in this lake for other organisms. This in turn will lead to a giant wave of death for insects and fish.  And now your ecosystem is dead. A second way of doing the exact same thing is to bring in an alien species. So now an alien species is, of course, not from Mars, but maybe from North America. And maybe you bring in another frog species. And this frog species, which is, this is a real case, brings with it a new disease, like a fungus or something. Again, this is a real example. And what happens is that these fungus will kill many of the frogs that are here. The new frog species will be resistant to the fungus. No problem there.  Also, the new frog species might just eat too many insects. So the insects will die too, let's say. This will again turn the birds and the fish to dead birds and dead fish. And the algae will have a good time. And now you have a dead ecosystem again. And the third thing you could do is you could change the ecosystem on a geographical level. And here's where our system, our model of an ecosystem as a network, really starts to not work anymore. Because if you build a dam and you enlarge the lake, you don't really, it's hard to see from this model what will happen. But what could happen is that the fish have more place to live. So maybe they need less and they mate less. So then you have less fish. Or maybe the algae will have more space and they will spread out more. And this will again lead to the same thing that happened earlier. It's quite hard to say with a dam what happens. And again, this is a reminder that there are other layers of information, geographical and evolutionary or historical data information that is needed to really model an ecosystem correctly. So let's talk about what we can do about that. And I think we'll not talk about like what we can do in our everyday life. This is a very important topic. But maybe for another talk or for another discussion. I will talk in this talk more about more systemical things to do. And I think there are two main paths that we can go about. And I think these two paths are not exclusionary but they are needed both. And one thing is just leave earth alone. But maybe not the whole earth but just half of it. There is actually a project which is called Half Earth Project. And there is a great book that is called Half Earth written by E.O. Wilson where he argues and this organization argues that you should keep half of the area, surface area of the earth away from human impact. Half of it. We humans, we live on the other half of the earth and nature will thrive on the other half. The half will not be like that straight in the middle but it will be mathematically half of it in patches. And these patches should be as large as possible and so on and so on. Because right now humans have impacted 77% of land and 87% of ocean area and of ocean areas that are not covered by ice. That's a lot and this is really a problem. If you ever get the chance of arguing for a largeening natural reserves or safe spaces for nature please do that because in these nature can recover and nature can do its own thing without us interfering anymore. Especially if you think about the Amazon in Brazil I think this is something that many of you might have in mind that this, I think this will not get better just by itself and we really should, as humanity, we should work that most of the Amazon is still in untouched shape. This is very important again, leaving as much of the earth for nature as possible. But then you can only do this so much and we also need to think about the other half of the earth because we need food, we need places to live and this will still be a lot of impact on these areas. So the other suggestion that I would make to maybe you in this room and on the internet of course to do something about a sixth mass extinction is to hack it. Because we are now of course in a hacking conference. This is of course what we should do, just hack it and this will get better. Earlier today I was in the talk of Frank Liga with hacker ethics and I thought, oh well, I should have looked this up before I prepared the talk because there are many, many parallels that I would have taken if I had known this but I didn't, so I didn't. But I think when you go to the general mindset as far as I understand it, oven hacker, it is you have a system there, it is kind of a black box. You cannot really see it, how it works from the outside. You'll find a way in, you open it up and you use the information that you have gained about this system to either destroy it maybe or leverage it or make it better maybe.  And of course you shouldn't know something about the black box system to destroy it or to leverage it but to keep it alive as best as you can. So to do this we need more information how to put this into data because data is what we're working with, right? So let's go back to our lake ecosystem and on this slide again we have this network model in front of us. You can put many of these things into numbers. You can of course count the number of organisms that are in there and you can measure the interactions between them. You can then use these numbers to do some modeling. And this is a very, very simple model of just a predator-prey relationship which and how it changes all the time. And what's really interesting is that it has such a shape when you have on the x-axis the amount of prey and on the y-axis the amount of predators. This will be over time, this will circulate around a certain number. Of course these models can get as complicated as you want and I will not go much more into this detail but of course we could. So the best thing that you could have in terms of data when it comes to ecosystems would be interaction data because ecosystems as a network are defined by the interactions between the members of this network. These interactions should be then very detailed and in very between single organisms and so on. The problem is that it is very hard to get this data because you need to get outside and you will need to sit in the forest or in your ecosystem of choice and you would have to wait and look and see who interacts with whom. And while this might be feasible for larger organisms, let's say elephants, wolves or something like that, this is very infeasible for, for example, say insects. How do you want to measure the interactions between them? Of course there are ways to do them, to do that but still it's quite hard. But another way to get something like interaction data would be to track movements. So this is an image of organisms that are living in the sea, different organisms and from the movement data you can, as you know as hackers, because you say, well we don't want any movement data from humans, we do want movement data for animals. You can say who's connected to whom, who's living with whom, what kind of work does he or she do, same thing you can do with animals. But it's quite hard again to collect movement data for animals. What you can do is to put a GPS sender into the bodies of the animals. This has become easier and easier right now. Just a few weeks or months ago, a new module was added to the ISS called Icarus which makes it easier to track movements of organisms with a GPS sender. But still you would have to bring the GPS sender to the animal and the animal cannot be too small because it needs to carry this GPS sender without being harmed or anything by it. So another way to get some data is to simply more or less count the amount of organisms of every species that you have in your ecosystem. I told you that I work with bacteria and microorganisms so I want to present to you how we do this for microorganisms. We take a sample for example from lakes but you can also do this for soil or any other ecosystem for example, your skin is an ecosystem just as a lake or something so you could take a sample of that. Let's say you have enough bacteria in this sample, you can extract the DNA from these microorganisms quite easily actually in the lab. And then the next step would be to sequence it. So you take the physical object, this DNA and you turn this with a quite expensive machine into data, into text data actually. And what's more interesting is this text only contains of four different letters. So this is quite easy to work with for you as a informatician. This DNA you can then use to find out what organisms lived in your sample before you killed them by just looking up in some database what DNA sequences are present in what organisms. Again, this goes for microorganisms but of course as well for larger organisms. Then you can do some not so fancy analyses for example, simple correlation between many samples and you can say of course if these if two different organisms correlate over many samples they might be associated and that they might interact in nature. So that's what I do right now. I have two kinds of news now when it comes to data, data science, data ecology and how this might help us to save us all from a six mass extinction. And the good news is there is a lot of data out there. Before I looked for the creative comments of my images I had this Toy Story meme in there with data everywhere because there's a lot of data out there in public databases where it's really easy to download just right click it, it's public and so on and so on. So there's a lot of data out there people create a lot of data. Most of this data is from smaller surveys where they took two or three sites where they collected some data and put them on the internet. And the other thing is that this data is in a lot of shapes and a lot of different data is out there which brings me then to the bad news is for example, batch effects. I don't know whether you know this term but it simply means that if you have a different method of extracting the DNA from the samples or extracting the sequence from the DNA and so on this will change your result. So most of the data that is out there currently is not easily comparable because it was generated with mild differences. So this is a problem and this is like the bad news of data ecology.  I told you that we are facing right now a six mass extinction and what I didn't tell you but what I should tell you is we should not make the, we should not think that we as humans will survive this six mass extinction. We're just too large of an animal. We just use too much other organisms around us that will most likely go extinct so we will go extinct as well. We're facing a six mass extinctions. There are I think two different ways of avoiding this mass extinctions. The two ways need to go together to really do the job. The one thing is that we should leave our hands away from as much of nature as possible and then those places where we cannot keep our hands away from it we need to understand more and a good way to understand it is to use more data, more data and analyze this data more thoroughly but there is a problem which is bad effects. But before I really want to finish I want to give you a small invitation because when I prepared this talk I noticed that I will end on a bad note. It's never good to end on a bad note, isn't it? Especially when you're the last talk of the day. You will all go to bed with a bad mood and I don't want to do this. So I want to invite you to organize and to form a new kind of community which is right now called Open Digital Ecology Community and I'm really not happy about that name. But the idea is to, and this is not, I have thought a little bit about it. I think I know what would be necessary but I have not thought about this more. There is no infrastructure ready yet. So I invite you to form this with me to come together with you as generally people that are somewhat interested in data that maybe have a hacker mindset that maybe have some background in ecology but maybe not. Maybe you're just working with numbers because you like it and just to come together regardless of background as open. Also do this as an open source project just as you would do an open software project. Do this but as data science. And also do this openly so that everyone can use and reuse the data in every step of the way. Digital of course, as in data centered use all the data that is around and try to figure out how to use it and bring it together. And lastly a community as in citizen science. I think this would be a very interesting approach to bring in people. Usually citizen science projects are everyone should go out and take a water sample and send this water sample into some experts and these experts will analyze them. This is wonderful, this is very much needed. I think also we can do citizen science on the other levels of the analysis so we can do citizen science at the analysis step and we can bring experts and non-experts together there and work together and distribute work over more shoulders. Please think about this and I'm really not happy with the name. We need to change that name and I don't know how. Thought about this two weeks. So, with that being said, no, I want to give you one example because I come from Lake Ecology, this is what I'm always thinking about and I told you that I think that the most pressing problem right now are batch effects. So I think what this open digital ecology community, what a very good name, isn't it? Could do as a pet as a first project is to bring together all this different sequencing data from different sources, try to figure out how to remove the batch effect or how to analyze data with the batch effects in mind. There are some first steps in literature that could go there but we still need to figure out more about this then pre-process them and process them and then analyze them and maybe at the end find something new about ecology. In this case maybe Lake Ecology. Also might be Ocean Ecology. There is a lot of data out there for this. Might be soil ecology. There are some difficulties with that but we'll discuss them maybe later and so on. So this is my invitation to you to do this together with that being said now. I want to thank you. I really want to thank the organizers and everyone that's behind the scenes that they accepted this talk. I was very happy to hear about this. I'm very happy that you all have stayed here so long. This is the last talk. Amazing, isn't it? This is my mail address. Please write me via mail or maybe via Twitter if you have any more questions or meet me around. And now of course I want to take questions in the room and I'm very happy to start a discussion with you. Thank you. So that was a call to arms if I've ever heard one before. Excellent. We can take questions. We've got plenty of time for that. We have microphones throughout the room. There's one here, one on the other side two in the middle. There's also internet questions as well that will go through the signals angel. Please, a question is one or two sentences followed by a question mark and not your life story. So with that let's go to microphone two please. Yes, thank you for your interesting talk. And at the last bit you were talking about removing or dealing with the batch effects for data that has already been collected. Are there also initiatives to maybe standardize upcoming data collection? And can you tell a little bit about that? Yeah, there are a lot of, there are some, there for some fields there are a lot of them for some fields there are some of them. This would be very helpful if there were standardized methods and again they're starting to be more in place. But what I told you about all this DNA sequencing stuff is a very, very new field. Not two years, but 10 years. And things have not come together yet. This is the one thing that would be great. But the other thing is the other data is already out there and it's free, it's out there. And if we just throw it away now that would be a shame. Let's go back to microphone two again. So after analyzing the data, what's your idea of hacking ecosystems? So improving them or rebuilding them or something else? Yeah, this has been, I've been on purpose a little bit, didn't talk much about this because there's still something I think about a lot because I think, I mean, the first thing is to keep these ecosystems alive while still having some of the pressure they are facing right now. So the one thing is to reduce the pressure on the ecosystems but in case we cannot do this fully in a short time we need to figure out a way of maintaining the ecosystems while still having some of the pressure or having all of the pressure. Is that a good answer? Okay. So let me do one or two sentences more. So we, there are all these variables, right? Every node in the network I showed you could be regarded as a variable. What we are doing right now with, so in German you would say Jäger, in English it's more Forester. These guys are in the best cases doing maybe what I'm thinking about of going into the ecosystems while having some of the pressure relieved or having more pressure and manually trying to rectify the ecosystems in the best cases, in the worst cases they're killing for fun, which is bad. But in the best cases there are sculptors of ecosystems that stay alive although they're not in perfect shape. So with that let's go to the back of the room, microphone three. Well first thank you for this talk and this call for action. My background is database programming and I find it just very assuring to hear this idea from you as a data scientist. Is there, do you know of any website or so to connect database analysis specialists with data scientists or do we need to build this? For what exactly? For connecting hackers with data scientists who have data to analyze. In the, I don't think that this, I don't think this exists for people outside of academia.   So you have enough tech support? I, for now maybe yes, but let's not, let's not start now by excluding the database guys or people, sorry, the database people. Thank you. Microphone two in the front. Thank you, very inspiring talk. Let me ask you, you mentioned toward the end of your talk citizen science if you had the choice to name one or two of your favorite methods or activities or tools to enable and encourage this kind of community activities and science. What would that be? Oh, that's a good question, isn't it? And I have to boil it down to one or two. I think the main problem here is that the whole workflow is very, will have a lot of steps and these steps will be from different fields of academia. So there will be some standard bioinformatics steps that include a lot of algorithmics. Then there will be steps that use a lot of statistics. In my work I'm doing some machine learning to maybe get something more out of the data. So it's not that easy to just say, okay, use this one program and all your fears will be relieved, all your aches will be gone. This is why I think a community is needed, a group of people that talk and that can organize in different steps and that can maybe then still specialize but as non-experts. Thanks. Microfront three in the back. Yes, thank you for your interesting talk. I was wondering if you would have all data about ecosystems and have all this data interconnected. How can this contribute to stop the mass distinction of all the species? And should we not also think about the link to decision-making and the world it, that has in this the political field and, yeah. Yes, of course. There are two things I have thought about this and there are two thoughts I have. The one thing and both are not positive. So the one thing is we know so much about climate change. There is a single thing that we need to do to stop climate change and this is reducing CO2 emissions. It's very easy actually and it has been known for 20, maybe 30 years and decision-making is lacking by a lot. So I'm really, I don't know what else to do, what else scientists should do to change this because I think scientists usually they're very late back and they say, well, we don't know really. It's hard to say if you ask me, well, maybe, maybe not.  This is very not something that scientists really want to do but there is not much more that scientists can escalate in their language to tell policymakers. That's one step where I think very, I'm not really happy about things are going. Now the other hand, while climate change is very easy, there is only one variable that is the, if you pull this lever, everything will be okay. This is not the case for ecology. There are many levels, there are many variables, there are many things that would need to come together. So I think discussion with policymakers is very important. I have here focused on the science of the knowledge because I think this, because I myself, I'm very depressed about policymaking. This is my hope that maybe here, if we now find the solution, then maybe policymakers will listen, although they didn't for climate change. Microphone two in the front. Hi, I wondered you showed several examples of catastrophic failure in an ecosystem by say one parameter change or one new species introduced. And I wondered now, we have this system and we analyze it and maybe know very little of it and then we think, oh, we only have to change one thing and the whole forest dies. Is there a way to say like reduce the risk or say build like a petri dish for a whole lake or something where we can try? Or is there just a, well, we must try on the lake and see what happens? There are a very, very good question. There are many, I think, and I hope that there are some steps from a very, there are many people working right now on very small pet ecosystems where they just have two or three or four or five organisms that or species that interact with each other, which totally has not the complexity that real ecosystems have. There is a huge gap in this and I don't know whether it's really possible to replicate ecosystems in the lab at all because there are geographical parts of it so you would have to rebuild the lake in its entirety and also there are historical features so it does matter whether this species arrived there earlier than the other species. This will maybe not be possible. It will be necessary to do as much data crunching as you can to say, okay, I think we're 50% sure maybe we can, do we have another chance, choice, okay, let's do it. Sorry, sorry to tell you that. They're getting us all depressed here. Is there a microphone one or so? Is that a question? Thank you very much for this interesting talk and the amount of answer they give to our questions. According to your knowledge, your current knowledge, do you think we have any chance as a species to stop this extinction or only delay it? Yeah, I would really like to say some positive things. I would really like to say, oh yes, we can do it. Is this so doable? It's not easy, but do it. I don't know. I think maybe not, but I think this is not really an option. You know, there are so many places where you can say, okay, we can't do it, but still we have to try. So we cannot, as a scientist, I know that I cannot attain knowledge itself, but still I have to try. So this is maybe something like that. Maybe we cannot do it. Maybe we know right now that we cannot do it. Maybe the way to do it is very bad, but we still have to do it. So the microphone at the back, number three. I'd like to go one step back. I seem to understand that understanding the ecosystem is a big thing. So what can be done to understand the ecosystem better and to be able to predict what consequences decisions have? As a data scientist, of course I tell you, collect more data, analyze this data, and we will find perfect insights. Some other ecologists will tell you, okay, we need to go out and we need to categorize every single species with all the behavior in very fine detail to really understand the nice teeth of an ecosystem. So there might be very different answers. I think the data-centric point of view for an ecosystem is the one that scales the best to use that word.  Perfect. Microphone two. Yes, thank you also for the idea with the citizen data. I forgot the name already. Courage T. Good name I heard. Yeah, I think just for this idea to get drive, I asked myself it's maybe not better for workshops or that maybe people were interested just get her in the front of the stage after the talk and question and answer. Yeah, that would be great. Please do that. Let's gather in front of this stage later until unless we get kicked out of here. I don't know about that. When do we get kicked out of this room? Not at all. So let's stay here after that. No, please really do this. Let's form a small circle and let's talk about the basics of this and maybe we'll meet again in the next few days. So microphone one. Hi, I'm interested in soil. You mentioned there's a problem with soil. And I'm 100% sure there's over 9,000 people who will send you soil samples, like maybe a million people who are just like farmers or gardeners or just eco enthusiasts who, if they know on what to test, they share it. It's like I'm 100% sure, but what's the problem with soil in your, what you tease it like, what's the problem? Okay, please let me ask you a question back. What in soil are you interested in? Just generally are you working on soil? Building humus, maybe sequestering carbon as a solution. I don't know if it works. I really don't know. And I don't know if the science is like, if there's a consensus in science that it's bullshit or it's not. No, no, no, I don't want to go that far. There's a big, I'm coming again from a microbiological point of view. And in microbial ecology, there is the question whether everything is everywhere, but the environment selects. So you could say that if you take similar ecosystems, all the bacteria that are in the one ecosystem would also be in the other ecosystems with some changes because of there is more salt or less salt and so on and so on. For lakes, this is still under discussion and it seems to not be the case for soil. It is absolutely not in discussion because every soil is a little bit different and they're very hard to compare. So what I said, when I said soils are problematic is that they are harder to compare soil samples than lake samples, water samples from freshwater would be in theory. We might figure out if we form this beautiful new group that lake ecosystems are also very hard to compare or we might figure a way out to compare soil ecosystems. So this is the hopeful answer of the day or the other answers were very bad, but this is one. We might really see that soil is easy and not hard. We're starting to run out of time but let's take those last two questions if we can make them quick. And then after that, if you want to come and meet the speaker, that would be great. So number two. Good morning. You said we have to do two things. First, leave half of the earth human free and the second half make sure that our impact at ecosystem is very low. So we cannot use this first half maybe for producing food, is that correct? So my question is, do you think this is possible with nearly at the moment 8 billion people? Think it, I don't know, I really don't know. I'm not that big, I don't know that much about agriculture to really say that. I hear different things, but most people tell me that it should be possible to buy the right mixture of different styles of farming and to buy some people having more intensive farming and some, most of the other people have less intensive farming and so on and so on. I don't know this in detail. Again, I think it must, it needs to be possible. It cannot be the case that we, I mean, what happens in parts of the world, as you know, is we just take a part of a rainforest which is the highest biodiversity of the whole earth, make it, kill everything that's on it and put in one single plant and kill. All the other plants again and again and kill some of the insects, or most of the insects. And this is, I don't have words for this. This cannot go on further and further. We need to find a way to reduce the amount of land we need for farming. Thank you. Also I think that population control cannot be ethically. It's very hard to argue for population control, direct population control ethically. I don't think that this can be directly part of the answer. So the very last question for number two. Hi, when we look at chaos theory where a system swings around different attractors and we add or remove a new attractor, this system will be out of control. We can't predict it with the old data. Will we be able to predict something with these data we collect right now when the whole system already changed? Yeah, let's say we have different samples and we have samples from ecosystems where all the parts are in place. And let's say we have samples from ecosystems where all of the parts are in place except for one. We took out one organism. And let's say we have ecosystems where all the parts are in place but two. And let's hope that we'll find something like this and we can say, okay, it seems like these are all the parts that are in play and we took out one and we took out two and if we put them back, maybe we can go back to the other samples quality. So with that, we need to wrap up the question. Sorry about that. Let's thank the speaker again. Give him a really warm applause for this great talk. Thank you.


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All my cars have to have good steriles. I mean loud steriles. You got to feel the music. Hey, do some hopping. Your ban on cruising in National City is over. In just two weeks, many men and women are planning to join the low and slow cruise in the streets of National City. Keep going. My name is Vincent Palacios. I grew up in Paradise Hills. I moved here in 1976. I have a lowrider shop. It doesn't take care of all the bills, but it's an enjoyment to see people drive away like they got a new toy on Christmas. All my kids have all cruised with me. My youngest son helps me at the shop and is like really involved in the lowriding community. This one doesn't hop. I mean I can play with it, but it doesn't hop. Not meant for hopping. Yeah. Oh my God. Now she's going to get stuck.  So go there. Y'all know the address? I can type it in my phone. I think if you look up Chicano parking, it should. Yeah, bring this girl. All right. Back in 82, the lowriding, yeah, it was a lot more funer. This whole area right here on your right would just get packed with people. All the lowriders were parking this parking lot and it would get crazy over here. So lowriding was really born, you know, after World War II and there was a sort of rise in car culture activities and cruising and demolition derbies and custom culture. Chicanos have definitely been key in popularizing lowriding, but I think you begin to see in the 90s, particularly here in LA like anti-cruising ordinances, cracking down right on cruising, cracking down on if a certain amount of black men or brown men would be hanging out in the street. We called those gang injunctions which they could be gang members or it could just be a group of friends or a club hanging out. The police could use that to sort of crack down. So that's when you sort of see those cruising ordinances really being put into effect here. It wasn't until like the 90s the police started harassing us. They put signs up on Highland Avenue and said cruising is prohibited and they would actually measure with a cigarette pack. If it was lower than a cigarette pack, then you were illegal. Why pick up one style of car or one race? It's unfair, big time. I've grown up seeing the cruising ban and always wondering why really was it banned and why my dad's generation of low-riding wasn't able to express themselves anymore. I think one of the reasons about like cruising is that it's sort of slowing down traffic. Just even during the pandemic it got shut down. People that come and do the donuts and motorcycles and then it became this public nuisance and so I think it's always attention. I couldn't even tell you the age of when I started going cruising. It's been all my life. It goes from cruising with your dad in the back seat with your parents to building model car kits. This weekend is Chicano Park Day coming up this Saturday one of the biggest events in San Diego in the low-rider community. After three years of either no celebrations or a virtual one, Chicano Park Day is back in full force. The ban in Highland. It made Chicano Park even more popular because nobody wanted to go down to Highland because of the cops. Straight now, straight now, straight now. Okay, now straight. Hey, did we get a good spot or what? Chicano Park, that was the people's park. So cruising on Chicano Park that never stopped. Chicano Park Day is really to commemorate the fights all those years ago back in the 70s to keep this park here. If this park wasn't here, you wouldn't be able to show off your car or your Chicano culture. Tell me about that. This is kind of the epicenter in San Diego for low-riding. So we enjoy coming out here and we don't go to harass or nothing. It's beautiful out here. Awesome. Thank you so much. It's good to have today. I've only been going since the late 80s. I can tell you for sure because of the community it's in. That community has really evolved. Today I think what is different with cruising is that low riders are trying to work with their local cities to sort of end the anti-cruising ordinances. Like they've been successful in Sacramento, in San Jose, and also in National City just recently, which is out there by San Diego. But there's still a California anti-cruising ordinance that's in existence. So the work right now is to sort of end the anti-cruising ordinance in California and then for local cities to find a way for low riders to work with law enforcement to have sort of a cruising space that is not a public nuisance. We are off to go see Jovita and Rabbit. Rabbit I've known probably 20, 30 years plus. He used to be in a car club called in Alvita. She's more of the person who talked to me about the repeal in National City. How was he kind of like? Crazy, crazy, crazy. But everybody's been craving it for four years because of COVID. It was even hard to walk down the aisles to look at cars. Mr. Rabbit Vincent This one's a hard one to get right here. Yes, that was especially after the mayor took them all down. People were stealing them. They invited everybody over there and it becomes like a community really fast. Literally we had papers and questions and we wrote down I think number one was do we bring crime? Do we cause problems? That's what we're trying to address so that when we do go to like a community event that doesn't happen no more. You know, when we started all we wanted to do was repeal the ordinance. Yeah. We got text messages within seconds Congratulations, congratulations. Wow, you guys did it. What a historical moment. Well, you know, so my son's so younger, right? So I've been like saving the paper and little things because he'll be able to brag or whatever. My dad helped repeal the criminal cruising and all that stuff. Owning a car is like injuring your house, your car and I think that low-riding is a great example to me just like hip-hop right of like people use culture to tell their stories to mark space in the United States to say this is what makes us unique. Everybody to downtown Paradise Hill so we just thank you for the sunny afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen let the cruising begin. For me low-riding is just enjoying going out on a nice day and hanging out with my friends and hearing great music. It's a way of life. I don't think low-riding is ever going to die in our family it's just something we've always loved and enjoyed expressing ourselves.


Our next speaker is Daniel Loxton. Daniel Loxton is the editor of Junior Skeptic. I know we all buy Skeptic magazine and we sort of pretend to read the front first, but we all go to the Junior Skeptic first. We all go to the back and check it out. We're gonna set up his machine here, awesome. Daniel's just one of the nicest people in the world too. He's just a favorite person of mine, so I'm honored to introduce him. Give us one sec here. His talk is called, oh, he's got a book, which, if you have kids and you wanna sort of have them involved with how to teach them evolution, it's called Evolution and How We and All Living Things Came to Be. It's a beautiful book. He's got a bunch of these, but that one is my absolute favorite. So it's really great to check that out. So, a rare and beautiful thing, that's the name of his talk, and his limerick is by drawing both creatures and men and coloring time, and again, with his artistic teaching and the kids that he's reaching, Daniel's Saving the Future by Pen. Please welcome Daniel Loxton. Thanks for having me. I work for Michael Schermer and Pat Lindsey at the Skeptic Society, where I've done the junior skeptic section of Skeptic Magazine for the past 12 years or so, writing on everything from alien abduction to crystal skulls to the curse of King Tut. Generally, I spend my time making things, mostly for kids. I make pictures often with my friend Jim Smith. I write stories. I do research. To the best of my ability, I do what skeptics have done for decades. I study paranormal and pseudoscientific claims, solve mysteries, tell the public what we have learned. As a footnote to doing scientific skepticism, I also do some writing about this kind of work. I do a little blogging, and I've written op-eds in historical explorations about the principles and ethics and craft of what we do. My inward-looking discussions in articles and interviews and tweets often have to do with the challenges and scope of traditional scientific skepticism, describing the uniqueness of the Skeptical Project, exploring its contested boundaries with other parallel rationalist movements. But today, I want to see this strange, rare jewel with all its flaws and inclusions in a different kind of light. Rather than talking about what makes skepticism difficult, I want to argue that skepticism is beautiful. This may seem like a strange term to use. Skepticism has a reputation as blunt and plodding. Even skepticism's friends often treat it as something a little embarrassing. As Stephen Jay Gould observed, skepticism or debunking often receives the bad rap reserved for activities like garbage disposal that absolutely must be done for a safe and sane life but seem either unglamorous or unworthy of overt celebration. I love the comparison with garbage collecting because it emphasizes the unending labor, unsavory subject matter, and practical usefulness of the Skeptical Project. It's a comparison many have made. The scientific debunker's job, I'm losing my notes here. Apologies. The scientific debunker's job may be compared to that of the trash collector, said science fiction writer, Elsbrock DeKamp in 1986. The fact that the garbage truck goes by today, he wrote, does not mean that there will not be another load tomorrow. But if the garbage were not collected at all, the results would be much worse, as some cities found when the sanitation workers went on strike. There may seem little beauty in this image, but as an artist it's my job to try and find it, to look for it. Happily, artists are not the only ones who do this, as Richard Feynman once explained in reference to the beauty of a flower. There are all kinds of interesting questions, he said, that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. Now, it's one thing to find beauty in a flower, but I believe it is also there to be seen in skepticism's noble tradition of necessary service. When I talk about beauty, I'm obviously stepping outside of the empirical framework of scientific skepticism. I'm speaking about that work as a person who comes to my job with personal values, moral intuitions, and sources of meaning and purpose. These are what motivate me to do this work. I'd like to play some remarks here from J.R.F. President, D.J. Grothe. And you know that I've never heard someone who's really passionate about comic books, even if they're obsessed with comic books. I've never heard anyone refer to their love of comic books as a calling, right? I hear skeptics honest use that term frequently. The passion I feel for magic is unlike the passion I feel for skepticism. It lacks a component that my love of skepticism has. Why is that? I submit that you are here today and that my passion for advancing skepticism in society is different than my love of comic books or maybe playing video games on our Xbox 360 because skepticism is more than just a hobby, I'll argue. And it's more than just a club. I'll argue today that you're involved with skepticism. Here it is because skepticism is a humanism. I happen to identify personally as a secular humanist but I know and Grothe knows that the skeptical community is broader than that. The people in this audience identify with the diversity of faith traditions and schools of thought. Grothe used humanism here in this very broad, perhaps universal sense. People from all backgrounds feel moved by goodness and some people see goodness in skepticism. Film critic Roger Ebert observed that the visceral emotional experience of elevation, of spiritual uplift comes not through messages or happy endings or sad ones, but in moments when characters we believe in, even an animated robot garbage man, achieve something good. I'd go even further. We feel that straight to the spine sense of elevation when we see someone choose to try to do something good. Ebert also once said. For me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. It lets you understand hopes, aspirations, dreams, and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us. Stories do that, true stories do that. When I saw this trailer, I was struck powerfully by this phrase, a machine that generates empathy because I remembered saying something similar. In 2007, I was a regular listener to a popular podcast, The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Today I count the hosts as friends, but at that time they were the voices of strangers. Yet I felt a profound sense of community, of fraternity with these people because they spoke to the subjects of my passions and because their ideas and laughter came into my home every week. And so I found myself tremendously moved when I heard the news of the death of co-host, Perry DeAngeles, and heard the sorrow in the voices of his friends. I found myself writing to them asking, what does one say to strangers about the loss of their close friend? I don't know, but I'm struck by the importance of what Perry built with you. I'm one of those who believes wholeheartedly in skepticism as a project to reduce harm to real people. Something like the SGU is a fair sort of thing to leave behind. Not a hobby, not an entertainment, but a machine for helping people. If skepticism is a machine for helping people, it's a machine of tremendous antiquity. Not long ago, I saw this tweet from comedian and talk show host Craig Ferguson. I realized I'm late to the party by nearly 2,000 years, but iconoclastic rascal Lucian of Sama Sada may be my new favorite skeptic. Lucian was a second century Roman writer and debunker. I published a junior skeptic in 2012 about Lucian and his James Randy-like battle against a celebrity psychic, Alexander of Obonotychus, who founded a snake god cult. It's a case which is not well known in these forgetful days, but which has been a touchstone for skeptics for centuries. In 1935, psychologist and activist skeptic, Joseph Jastrow, wrote about Lucian and Alexander in his book, Error and Excentricity in Human Belief. The temptation to deceive is as old as the human race, he wrote, and so is the inclination to succumb to deception, which is credulity. To this, we might add that the thirst to investigate is just as old for as Jastrow goes on, there is an instance of it, classical in every sense, which written 1800 years ago reads like a modern expose, even to the details of ways and means. To read Lucian's book on Alexander the Oraclemonger is to be shocked by familiarity. I almost beg you to read it, it's short, but I'll tell you some of that story today. Alexander was a con man who graduated a cult leader using tricks which are still used in fortune telling and mediumship today. Lucian describes him as an exceptionally handsome man with a clear, deep persuasive voice. In understanding, resource, acuteness, Lucian recalled, he was far above other men, curiosity, receptiveness, memory, all these were his in overflowing measures, but he used them for the worst purposes. Establishing himself as a prophet, Alexander spread rumors in a bonaticus about an imminent miracle, about the advent of a God on earth. When he had stoked up a fever of public interest, he ran out one morning into the city marketplace wearing only a loincloth, and climbed up on a high altar, raving, wild eyed, yelling at the crowd. He cried out that the time had come. A God was coming to a bonaticus right now. He ran to a temple construction site followed by an amazed throng of men, women, and children. Singing hymns, Alexander splashed into the mud and the water of the excavation for the foundation of the temple. He plunged a bowl into the mud and in triumph lifted out a miracle. It was a goose egg. When Alexander broke open the egg into his hollowed palm, it was seen to contain a live snake. It was, he said, the newborn God. The crowd could see it stirring and winding about his fingers, Lucian wrote, and they raised a shout, hailed the God, blessed the city, and every mouth was full of prayers for treasure and wealth and health and all the other good things that he might give. Well, this bit with the egg was a magic trick. Lucian explained how it was done. The egg was blown out in advance, resealed with a small snake inside and planted at the construction site to be found on cue. But here's the thing. This exact same effect is used to devastating impact by psychic scammers today. In the modern Boojoo or egg curse scam, fortune tellers hatched snakes, worms, hair, or blood from an apparently ordinary egg or tomato, revealing that the mark or her money is cursed and must be cleansed by the fortune teller. Every year, countless people lose their savings to a scam that goes back to the days of the Roman Empire. A few days later, Alexander opened shop in a dimly lit audience chamber. Miraculously, the snake god was now fully grown, his writhing body played by a large python and its human-like head by a handcrafted prop. The wonder struck crowd was hustled past the special effect before they could look too closely. But all this was stage dressing, pattern, for the trick that Alexander built his business on, which was fortune telling. Alexander understood, Lucian said, that human life is under the absolute dominion of two mighty principles, fear and hope. And whether a man is most swayed by the one or by the other, what he must most depend upon and desire is a knowledge of futurity, which Alexander was happy to sell. He directed everyone to write down in a scroll what he especially wished to learn to tie it up and to seal it with wax or clay. Alexander took these sealed questions into an inner chamber. There, in communion with the god, he wrote an answer on the outside of each scroll and returned it with the seal upon it just as it was apparently unopened. Well, this is a trick too and psychics still perform it today. There are many variations, but the basic secret is, as Lucian put it, obvious. Alexander contrived various methods of undoing the seals, read the questions, answered them as seemed good, and then folded, sealed and returned them to the great astonishment of the recipients. Lucian described a few of the techniques he knew for doing this, such as sliding a hot needle under a wax seal. If the scroll couldn't be opened, the questioner could be pumped for clues or answers could be written in mystic gibberish. The services of an interpreter were available for an additional fee. Today, skeptical investigators, such as Joe Nickel, often seek to trap psychics who perform readings of sealed messages. They may provide false information for the psychic to incorporate into their reading or attempt to mark the message in a way that would reveal substitution or make the message difficult to open without leaving a sign. 1800 years ago, Lucian did the exact same thing. Many such traps, in fact, were set for him by me and by others, Lucian wrote. He sent well-sealed scrolls, which asked one thing, but allowed his servants to believe they asked something else. When Alexander's answers came back, they reflected the information that could be pumped from the servants who delivered the scrolls, not what was written inside. On another occasion, Lucian sent money for eight questions and got back eight completely meaningless answers. But the tamper-proof scroll, he sent, asked only this, when will Alexander's imposter be detected? In some instances, it was detected. Like other psychics, Alexander was ultimately making it up and he was frequently, sometimes horrifically wrong. In a case that mirrors modern psychic Sylvia Brown's incorrect declaration that kidnapping victim, Sean Hornbeck, had been murdered, Alexander pronounced that a missing young man from a wealthy family had been killed by his servants. Those poor people were tried, found guilty, and executed by means of wild beasts. But the young man was alive, he'd been traveling. When this was discovered, another skeptic stood up in a large crowd like this one and bravely confronted Alexander about the blood on his hands. Alexander's response, he ordered his audience to stone the skeptic to death, which they attempted to do. Despite opposition from skeptics, Alexander's influence only grew. He bound wealthy clients into unshakable loyalty. He advised military planners, he sold invented cures and spells of protection from plague. The authorities refused to take action and Alexander's psychic career continued until he died wealthy and powerful at almost age 70, which we know because Lucian told us about it. Why did Lucian do that? What made him study and record and critique Alexander's career of paranormal deception? While Alexander lived, the answer was one which has smoldered in the hearts of skeptics for almost 2,000 years. When unfounded claims burn out of control, people get hurt. Alexander was dangerous, he preyed on people. His lies sent people to their annihilation. He sold deadly false confidence in times of plague, sent soldiers into disaster when they might have been kept from harm's way. There was a clear need for someone to do something and it fell on skeptics like Lucian to try. Lucian continued this work of skeptical scholarship. Even after Alexander's death, why? Because Lucian was not alone in that work. His book on Alexander was written at the request of his friend Celsus who had written debunking books of his own exposing the fakery of sorcerers. An account of Alexander's trickery was no trifling task Lucian objected to his friend. Also, he had ethical qualms about writing it.  There are you asking that the memory of an arch scoundrel be perpetuated in writing. Here am I going seriously into an investigation of this sort. A scam artist like Alexander did not deserve study, Lucian said, but to be torn to pieces in the amphitheater by apes or foxes with a vast audience looking on. But Lucian told himself there was value in this work, that there were constructive lessons to learn and to teach in the study of scam artists and occult beliefs. We may be glad that he did. Lucian was far more than an exposure of false prophets, wrote Joseph Jastrow in 1935. He is entitled to remembrance as one of the first students of the strange beliefs of men. We are all students in that same school of the weird and the wild and the wicked. And for centuries, students of skepticism have turned back to learn from older texts. Carl Sagan explicitly linked the practices of modern psychics, including those described in LaMarquine's The Psychic Mafia to the criminal practices of Alexander. Sagan also linked the useful work of the skeptical movement to Lucian and his colleagues. Philosopher David Hume retold the story of Lucian and Alexander in his enquiry concerning human understanding. In doing so, Hume wrote what may be the single most important sentence ever written about why skepticism exists as a movement. Hume wrote, but though much to be wished, it does not always happen that every Alexander meets with Lucian, ready to expose and detect his imposters. For as long as there have been claims that sound too good to be true, there have been people who felt drawn to the task of finding out. And always throughout history, at all times, those people have been too scattered and too few. But the dawn of an organized skeptical movement brought light to a shared horizon. It unified what had been scattered. It drew together people, very different in many ways, who found that they were talking about the same things. Scientific skepticism recognized a literature of common insights, connected the people who studied the fringe, and showed that their investigations collectively comprised a distinct field of study. There are people in this room with us today who have fought for skepticism for 40, 50, even 60 years. How many careers were spent? How many lives were lived in service of skepticism before even those people were born? Few people begin to realize the depth or the breadth or the scale of the skeptical efforts which have taken place in previous generations. The man with the chalkboard is Joseph Rinn, demonstrating mediumistic trickery to a press syndicate in 1920. For decades, Rinn was in the thick of every major occult battle in America. He formed a New York based skeptics group in 1905. Rinn was present for confessions by the Fox sisters, the founders of spiritualism. He took Harry Houdini to his first seance. And while young Houdini was busy building a showbiz career, was himself performing the talking to the dead routine, he would later realize bordered on crime. Rinn was arguing as a skeptic in the media that wonderful phenomena demand wonderful evidence. When Rinn's old friend Houdini finally did get into the fight, he arrived as a mighty champion. He brought skill and knowledge and wealth and fame. Houdini studied and investigated and wrote books and gave demonstrations. He went to Congress to fight for tougher laws against fraudulent fortune tellers at least in the nation's capital. He fought with passion and gravity of purpose and he lost. There is a strange and heartbreaking beauty in that. Houdini's mission continued even after his death in 1926. Rose Macenburg, the head of Houdini's team of undercover agents continued to pursue psychic scam artists as a private investigator, lecturer and consulting expert for decades. Having investigated crimes of all types, Macenburg believed the most vicious criminals in America are the charlatans who betray and plunder their hard sick victims in the name of the dear departed dead, especially those who work in organized gangs. She called them conscienceless scoundrels, devoid of even the most elementary feelings of decency and pity and was proud to have helped put many behind bars. It was her life's work. In 1931, inspired by Houdini's example, the Society of American Magicians joined forces with the NYPD to try to rid New York City of its burden of paranormal scammers. The officer in charge was the head of the police women's bureau, Detective Mary Sullivan, a pioneer who had joined the force in 1911. She was the second woman in the NYPD ever to be raised to detective of first grade and the first to have served on the homicide squad. At that time, police women specialized in undercover work, such as shoplifting, quack medicine and fortune telling. So when she joined with the magicians, Sullivan had already spent 20 years busting psychic scams as a cop. She had good reason to care about that work. I had a personal reason for finding the fortune teller hunt attractive, she wrote. When I was a child, my five-year-old brother wandered out of the house after mass one Sunday and was never seen again. Tortured by uncertainty as to whether he was alive or dead, my mother turned to fortune tellers for guidance. For years, they led her on from one false hope to another, telling her that he would be brought home by shipboard the following spring, that a dark woman was holding a prisoner in a basement that we would see him on the street when he was 15 years old. The repeated disappointments my mother suffered caused her as much pain as if the boy had been lost to her many times instead of only once. My recollection of all this made it doubly pleasant, doubly pleasant to me to flash my badge before an astonished Ceres and tell her that she and her paraphernalia were about to depart for a ride. Reducing this intimate kind of harm, matters, seeking justice for victims, matters, especially when few people care, as Jamie in Swiss has asked on this stage. How can you say psychic fraud doesn't matter when there is a steady stream of news stories about victims who give up life savings to psychic conars? Do you think it mattered to the victims? There is much more to skeptical history than we can talk about today. There is more than I will learn in my lifetime. Here are just a few of the skeptical books published before I was born. Skepticism is a bright, shining thread that runs through the whole of the human tapestry. We can follow that thread of curiosity and conscience in places with difficulty. Through the entire length of the history of civilization, skepticism is part of who we are. It is part of who we always have been. It is a deep and essential part of our better nature. And it is beautiful to me. Scientific skepticism connects us with lives lived, struggles undertaken by men and women who lived and fought and challenged and questioned and sometimes risked everything, decades, even centuries ago. We are brothers and sisters to those who have for millennia chosen this particular way to help. We are connected to those who refuse to accept the deceitful cruelties of their times, connected to those who felt called to light candles because they cursed the darkness. There is beauty in this choice in life, beauty in the attempt to push back the night. But candles do more than hold back the darkness. That small warm light also allows us to take our children by the hand and show them how big and how wonderful the universe really is. Every child deserves to see from those great heights. It's a view that belongs to everyone. And the moral calling to share that view is beautiful. Skepticism is lifted up by the belief that knowledge can help people, that truth is better than falsehood, that there is more to the world than cynicism and deceit. As Michael Shermer has said, skepticism is a celebration of the scientific spirit and the joy inherent in exploring the world's great mysteries, even when final answers are not forthcoming. The intellectual journey matters, not the destination. Thank you.


Hi everyone. My name is Eddie Lee. I'm from 4-5 Software and I'm going to talk about comparing application security tools. My talk is going to be pretty packed so I'm just basically going to speed talk through this and I might breathe through it. So bear with me. So the agenda for today's talk is I'm just going to give a brief intro to my experiment about comparing application security tools. Go into the methodology and how you can reproduce your own experiments and go into the results of my experiment and then go into conclusions. So what I did in this experiment was actually I used two of the market leading dynamic pen testing tools for web applications. I used a static code analyzer, a source code analyzer, and I used a dynamic test tracing tool. I'll talk about these tools on the next slide. The application I scanned was actually an open source Java-based blogging application. You can find it on Sourceforge. Initially I chose this application because I thought it would be really easy to scan with all these tools. It actually turned out that it was more difficult than I thought. It was more time consuming than I thought.  But that proved to be overly ambitious. So for today's talk I'm just going to talk about the results for one application. So I basically took these tools and I used them out of the box with little configuration. So basically for the dynamic pen testing tools, I gave the tools a URL, some login information, and I let it run. And in some cases I ran them in manual mode as well. And then I compared the findings from each of the tools. How do these tools work? Well, for the dynamic testing tools, first what they do is they fuzz web input. They basically crawl web applications looking for all sorts of web forms. And when it finds all those forms it'll actually try to fuzz the inputs. Like say if it's testing for cross-site scripting, it'll try to inject some kind of script tags. If it's looking for SQL injection and they inject a single quote. And the way it finds these kind of vulnerabilities is usually signature based or behavioral matching. Signature based for say cross-site scripting, it'll look to see if the fuzz string was reflected back by the application. For SQL injection, it'll look for say certain error messages like SQL exception or something like that. These dynamic pen testing tools also have a couple modes that you can run them in. You can run them first in autocrawl mode, basically point and click mode. You give the tool a URL and some login information and you press go. And the tool will try to find vulnerabilities in the app. Generally that's not very thorough so they also have a manual crawl mode where a human or in this case me, I actually crawl the web application trying to give the tool an idea of what kind of page flow the application had. And then the tool would actually take over and perform autocrawl after that. So these manual crawls are generally more thorough in their testing. With the source code analyzer, these tools actually have a couple analyzers within them themselves. For example, data flow analyzer which basically looks at source code. It knows when malicious input comes in from some source API and when it traces that input throughout the program, throughout the source code. And it knows when it reaches a specific sync API, a security sensitive sync. So in the case of say SQL injection, it knows when there's input coming in from the web and it knows that that input, that string reaches a say database API. Control flow is basically the analysis of a sequence of events in your code. So this may be certain things like looking for a null pointer dereference. If you have a method that returns a null value and then use that value without checking to see if it's null, it will find bugs like that. The semantic analyzer is basically like a super grep that will look for dangerous functions, things like that. The dynamic test tracing tool. This is kind of a new tool. The way it works is actually through bytecode instrumentation on say Java or .NET code. Basically what it does is it injects your compiled web app with monitors. These monitors actually run and monitor the application while you're running your dynamic testing tools, your pen testing tools. So it actually will observe fuzzing input coming into the application and it'll watch to see if that data reaches sensitive APIs in your web app. So you do run that in conjunction with your web pen testing tools. So methodology. Well, basically this is how you would reproduce these experiments on your own, download the source code and build and deploy the application. That sounds pretty straightforward, but generally things don't always build when you download them from, say, SourceForge. But once you do deploy your application, you've got to make sure you know how to undeploy your application cleanly. For example, if your application requires a database, you need to be able to restore the database after a pen test because the first input from your pen test may affect results in subsequent pen tests. So you want to really clear the database between runs. So when you run the scanner in autocoll mode, you just want to make sure the applications don't break. So while you're running your pen test tools for the first time, you basically want to keep checking the web app to make sure that it's still running and nothing is broken. Basically, you want to check certain areas of the web app just to make sure it functions correctly. If you do find that the web app breaks, you have to stop your autocoll testing, go back, reconfigure the scanner and test again, and be sure to clear your database before you retest. And that can be a really tedious process, but the configurations and settings will carry over to your next test, which is the manual crawl mode. So after you finish your autocoll mode, you want to go into your manual crawl mode, which basically means you browse through all the pages of the web app, and then you let the web scanner take over from there. Of course, after you've finished your scans, you want to verify the results. So what I did was I manually verified the results. A lot of times, these tools will say there's a lot of vulnerabilities over here, but they may be false positive, and you just want to weed out those false positives and also make a note of the false positive rate in case you want to compare tools to see what kind of false positives they have. And finally, you want to normalize the results. Different tools report vulnerabilities differently. Say for the dynamic testing tools, they will report vulnerabilities based on a URL and parameter basis, whereas the source code analyzers will report vulnerabilities on a file named line number basis. For my experiment, I actually chose to normalize vulnerabilities based on a source code file and line number basis. Running your source code analyzers. Well, there's not much to it. Basically, you get your source code, you point your scanner at it, tell it where the libraries and dependencies are, and you tell it to go. Just make sure you're scanning the same source code that you use to deploy your application or compile your application in the dynamic testing. Again, verify the results via manual testing and weed out the false positives and record the false positive rate and normalize the results. With the dynamic tracing tool, the way it works is first you instrument the compiled code, you basically inject the code with monitors, then you deploy the instrumented code, and then you tell the application you want to start recording. So after you tell it to start recording, you run your dynamic test tools on it, and all these monitors will start recording interactions between your fuzzer and the code. After the test is done, you stop recording and again, verify results, record false positives, and normalize the results. Okay, here, this is a big table. I know most of you can't read it. This is in your slides on the DefCon CD if you want to reference that. But let me just go over briefly what you see here. On the left, you'll actually see vulnerability information, and on the right, you'll see which tools actually found each vulnerability. The red X means that a specific tool, the vulnerability was found by that tool only in that column. A black X means that the vulnerability was found by multiple tools. So let me just go through the first line to help you guys understand this table more in depth. Here, the vulnerability occurs in the file blogentry.jsp, on line number 16. To access it via the web, you would go to the urlsaveblogentry.secureaction. And to actually exploit this cross-excripting vulnerability, you would manipulate the title parameter. And in this case, the vulnerability was found by tool 1b and tool 2b. I'm not naming the tools here because I don't really want to bias anybody into thinking that one tool is better than the next. These tools will perform differently based on your own environment. So just because a specific tool looks like it performs well on this application, it may not be the case for your own application.  Again, so going back to this table, what you'll notice is that there are actually more red X's than black X's. What that means is there's not much overlap in findings between the tools. So tool 1b found a set of vulnerabilities, and tool 5a found a different set of vulnerabilities. You'll also notice that tool 1b, in this case, performed particularly well. So some vendors may say, well, my tool finds the most number of vulnerabilities, so we're the best. But if you actually look at the percentages, they'd find about, like, 65% of the known vulnerabilities. So you can't really rely on one tool to find all your vulnerabilities because if you do, you're still missing 35%, 40% of the vulnerabilities in your application. So let's just go into some exploit cases. Here we have in file error.jsp line number 18, there's actually this parameter, and it just printed out directly to a web page. Pretty straightforward vulnerability. They're not doing any kind of output filtering. To exploit this over here, you actually put in some scripting text into the URI section of the URL. Now, this is kind of difficult for dynamic testing tools to find because to exploit this processing vulnerability, you have to put the application in a certain error state. So this is something that actually one of the static tools found. On the next vulnerability we have here, viewResponse.jsp line number 31, this vulnerability was actually found by all of the tools. So this is a very straightforward vulnerability. You see that there's a hidden field, and in this particular JSP, a PRINTA raw variable again. Path manipulation. This is actually, again, one of the vulnerabilities that dynamic testing tools have trouble finding. There may or may not be a signature associated with path manipulation when testing over HTTP. In this case, this vulnerability allows an attacker to overwrite an arbitrary file on the file system. And actually there's no indication of that sent back through the web. This attack, for this attack, basically you put in ..slash, ..slash, and then some file name. You include a percent zero zero at the end for null termination to truncate the .properties extension. And then you can overwrite any file that the web server has permission to overwrite. Arbitrary URL redirection. This is mainly used for phishing. So what happens here is that you just put in, you type in any kind of URL into the redirect URL parameter, and then it passes that string to the send redirect method. And that just sets the HTTP response location header, and users can be tricked into going to other sites when they think they're actually going to your site. While verifying the vulnerabilities, actually, I noticed there were some vulnerabilities that weren't reported by any of the tools. So for one of the pages, I actually did a manual code audit, and I found eight additional cross-site scripting vulnerabilities that none of the tools found. So what this means is that you really can't rely on tools themselves to perform an extremely thorough audit. You really need manual auditing to make sure your code audits are thorough. What we see here is actually a pie chart of all the cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. Again, you see tool 1B here defines about 55% of the cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, but it misses about 45% of all the total cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. Again, you cannot rely on a single tool for all of your vulnerability assessments. All right, conclusions. Well, again, single tool doesn't cut it. Using multiple tools drastically increases the number of vulnerabilities that you find. There's actually little overlap between the tools, so really, you get a greater benefit by running all these tools. Tools alone are not enough. Manual audit really does help supplement these tools. You really can't rely on the tools to help you find vulnerabilities alone. And you really got to run these tests on your own app to see how these tools will perform. These tools really do perform differently in different environments. In my case, tool 1B seemed to have performed the best, but in your environment, maybe it would be tool 3A.  I mean, when I ran these dynamic testing tools, I had to reconfigure re-scanned applications several times. It took hours and days to basically scan these applications. So if you want to reproduce these experiments on your own, don't expect these tests to be quick. And that's it. Thanks. Any questions? Go ahead. The question was, what type of vulnerabilities were most difficult for these tools to detect? Well, on the dynamic side, things like path manipulation where vulnerabilities actually didn't exhibit any kind of behavior over HTTP. Those were really difficult for those pen-desting tools to find. The dynamic testing tools did excel in finding things like cross-eyed scripting, say, just because that's what they're designed for. The static tools actually had trouble finding understanding certain constructs in the code. And so it missed certain things because of that. Right. I used a couple of the market-leading web pen-desting tools. Sure. I think you'll need to contact my employer to answer that question for you. That's a good question. Say we were able to fix all the vulnerabilities that the tool found, how long would it take for the hacker to find the next one? That's my guess. In this case, actually, for this specific application, it would be pretty quick, actually. I think there are a lot of vulnerabilities that were not detected by any of the tools. But that's for this application in particular. There were some, but they were insignificant. They did not hinder me in verification of results or anything like that, which was surprising to me. Maybe like one out of 30 or something like that. The question was, what type of features would I recommend vendors to add to these packages? I think verification, something to assist in verification of what they report. So that you can validate that the results that they're reporting are actually true. The question was, how do you get these tools that detect cross-site request forgery? Actually, we're running out of time. We can talk more in the Track 1 QA breakout room. I'll be across the room over there.


Welcome to AC voltage conversions. The following are the types of values used to represent AC voltages, peak, RMS, and average. Note that the average value of a sine wave over one full cycle is actually zero. The 0.636 value pertains to a half cycle, and peak to peak. It is very important for technicians to be able to convert one type of voltage to another. There are several ways to convert voltages. When doing conversions, numbers need to be memorized, and calculations using multiplication and division are required. To simplify conversions from one value to another, this learning object will require multiplication only, memorization of four numbers, and utilization of the peak voltage as a reference. The following table is used as a reference for converting from one AC value to another AC value. The value given is listed in the left column. The value to be solved for is listed across the top. The given voltage value must be multiplied by a conversion number in the table to obtain the other type of voltage. The conversion number to be used is located in the box that intersects the given voltage and the new value to be solved for. To convert RMS voltage to peak voltage, follow the example. Given an initial AC voltage value of 120 volts RMS, use the formula from the table to calculate peak voltage as shown. To convert average voltage to peak voltage, follow the example. Given an initial AC voltage value of 107.6 volts average, use the formula from the table to calculate peak voltage as shown. To convert peak voltage to RMS voltage, follow the example. Given an initial AC voltage value of 169 volts peak, use the formula from the table to calculate RMS voltage as shown. To convert peak voltage to average voltage, follow the example. Given an initial AC voltage value of 169 volts peak, use the formula from the table to calculate average voltage as shown. To convert between RMS and average voltage, use peak voltage as a reference. First, convert the given value to peak voltage, then convert from the peak voltage to the desired value. For example, when converting 120 volts RMS to average, first convert to peak, as shown. Then convert peak to average, as shown. To convert from an RMS or average voltage to peak to peak, first convert the given voltage to peak, then multiply the peak voltage by 2. For example, convert 107.6 volts average to peak to peak. First, convert to peak, as shown. Then multiply peak voltage by 2. To convert from peak to peak voltage to RMS or average voltage, multiply the peak to peak voltage by 0.5 to obtain the peak voltage. Then convert the peak voltage to the desired RMS value. For example, convert 338 volts peak to peak to an RMS value. First, convert to peak voltage, as shown. Then convert the peak voltage to RMS. See if you can remember the four conversion factors. You have completed this activity, AC voltage conversions.