The Archaeological Research Facility is located at Wieschen, the ancestral and unceded territory of Chachanya-speaking Ohlone people, successors of the historic and sovereign ban of Verona Ban of Alameda County, who acknowledge that this land remains of great importance to the Ohlone people and that the ARF community here merits a history of archeological scholarship that has disturbed Ohlone ancestors and made it comes to a race living Ohlone people from the present and future of this land. For our collective responsibility, we critically transform our archeological inheritance and practice in support of Ohlone sovereignty and to hold the University of California accountable to the needs of all native and indigenous peoples by our actions as well as our words. So today, one of our brightest and best has returned to us. I'm all the way back up from the south to rejoin us. Dr. Felicia de Pena, who is Senior Project Director at Powerhouse of Archaeological Research and Theories, Statistical Research Incorporated in Redlands, she's back and I won't read her the title of her talk, you can read it for yourself, but she has worked closely with Dr. Carr, Dr. MacDonald out of the Epileptic Voyager sites and at Corona 4. She has taught us all in her tenure here before she became Dr. de Pena and Mystic Technology. She's done an amazing amount of work with Experimental Archaeology and is definitely one of those folks we point to as having raised the bar for our graduate program. So we're so glad to have her back. Join me in welcoming her. Thank you, June. I appreciate it. And thank you all for having me here today. I do want to start off really quickly with a thank you to Dr. Lisean-Hare, Dr. Carthelite Foot, and Dr. Jeffrey Sass without you guys. It's just been incredible to have you to be able to bounce ideas off of and to work back and forth and kind of build this dissertation and really what I'm going to be presenting here today. I'd also like to thank the ARC for all of the funding and the workshops and the faculty and for technology, right? Like all of this modeling that I've done, I wouldn't be able to do without access to the ARC. I'd like to thank Theresa Parquette because she's the one who taught me how to plant athlete cores. And as you guys are going to see, this is all about something. So I'd like to thank her for her time and her love of rockhounding and are fascinating discussions about rocks and how they turn them into blade cores. And then finally, I'd like to thank all of the plant nappers that participated. I had 12 novices and 12 skilled plant nappers participate in order to produce the experimental, the experimental basically all of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pieces of debitage and blade cores. So I want to thank everybody who participated in this because without it, it would not be what it is. So today I'm going to be discussing the identification of novice plant nappers and the archaeological record. So we all start off as novices and I love this picture. We start off as little kids, like even just adults coming to new technologies. We start off as novices and our knowledge of how to perform skills and tasks is inherently and culturally constructed and balanced. So the ways that we learn from effects, how we learn a particular technology through an experimental plant napping project, I was able to demonstrate statistical significance and differences between novices, intermediates and master plant nappers in blade core technology specifically. So I kind of ask, why is this important? Why do we need to know when we're looking at a blade core reduction? Why do we need to know that a novice or a master need it? And this allows us an extra peek into the past to be able to look at who's producing what and where and be able to understand these social relationships. So do we have masters interacting with novices, masters with masters? It's important to know. And when we're kind of faced with this, when we dig this up out of the ground, how do we tell that this is somebody who's masterful and how do we tell that this is a novice who's utilizing a completely different chain of explore or somebody like if this isn't following the chain of operations that we're expecting? Is it a master who's coming in from a different place, right? So there's so many different ways that we can interact with a blade core that maybe doesn't follow the norm. So we're going to kind of explore that a little bit later. First, I'm going to talk about for on a four and kind of situate us. So this is, you know, math would be in your east. So what we've got for on a four is an aggregation site. So it's an aggregation site that dates to 18,600 to about 19,800 LVP, right? It's generally an aggregation site considered to be an aggregation site, but we have millions of different lithics, all of different many different type of like typologies. So we have microliths are the major form of tool technologies that are used during the epithelial lithic broadly, so not just at Parana, but throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Middle, sorry, microliths are the type of tool that people predominantly use during this time period. The thing to note is that most sites don't have more than one or have a small selection of microlithic tool shapes. So kind of like rectangles or triangles, crescent shapes, right? Most sites only have a small handful. Parana has dozens. It has many different types of tool shapes, final tool shapes and all of the or not all, but most of the lithics are actually formed on local flint. So coming from about 15 kilometers away, which means that people are coming from different places and bringing their knowledge to the site and utilizing the local flint and kind of adding their, you know, their their understanding of what the tool is to the local resources. Other things that we find at Parana for there have been burials, there are huts, thermal features, activity areas, beads, a lot of funnel remains. So it's a really diverse site. And you can see there's there's significant kind of housing that's going on. So we know that there are huts structures that people are engaging with and that they're basically periods of hunting. So there's a very significant component of people actually living at this site. And we have flint mapping floors, which we'll talk about a little bit. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get too much into the flint mapping floors in this conversation. But hopefully in the future, we'll kind of explore those a little bit further. There is a flint mapping floor that we will be looking at that's that's dated to the early epithelia with it. And we'll kind of spend more time on that one. But I'd like to talk from from flicks to people. So when we're looking at debatage, right, when we're looking at when we're looking at debatage, we get a big, massive collection of hundreds or thousands at Piranha. Oftentimes it's thousands of pieces of debatage. Right. How do we get to the to the people? How do we get to the knowledge from it? Right. And so here I've got a refit blade core that I that I worked on. This one's from a middle Paleolithic site for sorry, middle epithelia with a part of Piranha 4. So it postates early epithelia with the material that we're going to be looking at. It has a very similar reductant structure. So we're going to talk about this in just a second. And I do want to point out some of the problems across the bottom blades are the predominant like this. It's the goal for these blade cores. You can see the core has both shaped front here. This is the same blade core from two different styles. And so so basically what this blade core allows a port napper to do is create these consistent blades that are very regular in shape. And you can turn those into Michael's very quickly, right? You can snap them off, snap at the bottom, snap at the top. You've got a tool. You can press your plate them. You can change them and modify them very quickly. It really like to hurry around, right? So instead of tearing around the big rock, you carry around a handful of these little blades and they're just incredibly light and durable, especially on this one. The chenna patois that we would usually see in blade like this or blade cores like this. So this one's one that I refit. We have early phases where we have a crested blade kind of coming off here early. And then there's core tablets. So we have one, two, three little core tablets. We can see them on the opposite side, two, three. And then additional blade core or crested blades here. But these are all kind of earlier reductant pieces that we would see that come off of the first stage of the first few stages. So you see that somebody's gone through and taken the cortex off of this side, unless the cortex on that side. So we'd see like, you know, initial reduction phase would include that cortex removal and creating these nice platforms for people to go through and actually start setting platforms and creating blades later on. The second stage we have going through people who are producing larger blades like this one. So those blades can then be used for more specific tools. So we can, we see people are using them for burins. People are using them to make scrapers and other types of tools that are heavier duty. But they're less common than the blade blades, right? So the ultimate goal is the blade blades for these particular tools. Finally, once we once we get past this kind of initial larger blade removals, we end up going for these smaller blades here. So these little bladelets are generally five centimeters long or a little bit shorter, right? And so these bladelets are ultimately the goal. And in order to maintain this core phase, right? In order to be able to consistently produce these blades off of a core like this, you have to actually correct things. So we see this like partially ridge blade down here that actually changes the face of the core. It changes the angles, takes off additional material. So that way a flint knapper can then continue to take more blades off of this particular blade core. So it's a combination. It's never the same thing, right? So if you're going to flint nap one of these cores, it's never going to be like ABCD, right? It's a set of ideas, a set of processes, a template that you're using to kind of generally approach the reduction of this blade core and then fixing problems as you go. So flint napping is basically mostly just problem solving. Yeah. And then the last thing, once we get down to these parts, again, they can get turned into tools really quickly. And then that's the ultimate part. So in my experiment, what I've been doing is focusing on the production of these blades as opposed to the tool production afterwards. So you'll see the work will really stop at blade production. I do want to say it's important for us to keep in mind that all the flint nap debatage that we're looking at and we'll look at was produced by people who lived, worked and learned and interacted within a community of practice. And so this community of practice ends up shaping the way that they approach these problems solving techniques. So fundamentally, I've got three kind of theoretical paradigms that I've used to structure this experiment. So situated learning is a common one that we learn here in the department. So situated learning is really pushing that masters and novices are interdependent, right? They need to be together in the same space. Masters are teaching novices, but novices are also carrying on a tradition. And so in order for tradition to continue, you need both masters and novices coexisting and working. And so these novices are just basically learning through these peripheral interactions to become more skilled at something at a particular skill. Channepatoir is that chain of operations, right? Those reduction sequences that I was just talking about.  It's not necessarily a set of instructions. It's not a set of, you know, if you go through first, you have to do this and then you have to do that. It's a general gist of how to approach these technologies and the production of them. And then finally, genetic processes. So this is coming from Saxon-Vygotsky and they're really pushing that a that a technology and knowledge is a history of knowledge. It's not just a simple thing that has been learned. It's every single person who has interacted with that knowledge beforehand and it's acquired through a lifetime. So when you get a piece of knowledge from somebody, they've learned it from somebody else with a certain perspective and then they've learned it from somebody else with a certain perspective. And so this continues on and on. So these bodies of knowledge have long histories that are affected by events in the past. So going from knowledge to skill, right? So we have we have knowledge, which is incredibly important. So we know that we have particular bodies of knowledge that exist, particular ways of approaching this tool reduction. What does that mean for skill? So skill is one of those kind of fluffy terms that we use, right? There's so many different aspects. Traditionally, the way that lithics skill is approached is regularity, complexity, symmetry, right? So a lot of more aesthetic ideas of what skill is. But there's also ideas of minimal platform preparation, minimal variation. There's also like minimal thickness for the width of a particular mythic artifact, right? And so all of these are most of them are based in assumptions. And so there's there's some issues with some of them, because a lot of times, you know, as archaeologists, we see like, OK, this is this is kind of what we see most commonly, right? This is what they're this is what their goal was. This is what the aim was. And so we're kind of assuming and placing our ideas of what is normal or what is commonly produced. We're just kind of assuming that that's the ultimate goal. That was what was considered skill, right? And I think that that's this problematic to kind of view the way that we see like regularity, right? To kind of force those ideas on an ancient past, right? There's there's ethnographic examples where people are considered highly masterful but produced things that the ethnographers were like, what's this? Like, why is this the same? And that that's like what's it? Katharine Weidman Arthur, she did some really interesting work on that. And it was like looking and exploring the different ways that that these people were considered skillful. But so so moving on from from those from those approaches, there's a significant body of research that then pushes that skill should kind of move away from those ideas and really take into effect on a sense, right? So the knowledge, right? And then combine it with Savar for know how. And so again, those are also two very fluffy terms, right? Knowledge and know how. How do we turn that into something productive that we can analyze, that we can mobilize, that we can actually use to understand the past? So what I ended up doing in order to approach knowledge and know how was I did an experiment, right? So we had a whole bunch of novices, 12 novices who signed up to participate in a footnapping experiment. They did 10 footnapping sessions with me. Of course, this was over like during COVID. So we had to do this via via Zoom. So this is a still for one of our from one of our Zoom footnapping sessions where people were like basically like footnapping. So we meet together a couple of times a week in some cases. I held multiple footnapping sessions each week and people could come as it fit their schedule. And we went after about 90 minutes a day. Each person was responsible for producing 10 blade force over that time period. And so they were basically footnapping together. We had kind of a nap in via Zoom. So this particular experiment here was set up to explore the following six questions. So do skilled footnappers make more mistakes than the... Or sorry, do unskilled footnappers make more mistakes than skilled footnappers and what types of errors are there? Do unskilled footnappers produce less courting elements than skilled footnappers? Do unskilled footnappers prepare�서 platforms less frequently than skilled footnappers? Do unskilled footnappers batter or crush platforms frequently or more frequently than skilled flat footnappers? Do unskilled footnappers or unskilled footnappers able to make blades from blade course consistently? And then are unskilled footnappers able to effectively utilize their footnappings tool kits in order to make successful removals. So each one of the flint nappers was given all the flint that they needed. And then all the protective gear, they were given hammer stones. So hammer stones of various sizes. They were given fillets in order to potentially effectively reduce these cores. They were also assigned some readings, so some basic flint napping, like background readings, some Whitaker. And then they were given a couple of short videos to watch regarding flint napping and blade port technologies. I gave them some of this background information because it's important for them to be able to kind of have some general understanding. Because I strongly believe that people in the ancient past would not have had flint napping in a completely separate place where only flint nappers can know. And there's most likely some interaction of the general idea of flint napping. So I thought it was important for the flint nappers to have at least a little bit of background. The novices themselves had to have less than five hours of flint napping experience in order to participate. And so it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun troubleshooting and dealing with all of the questions. I had so much fun with one for this. The skilled flint nappers, they went through different processes. So the skilled flint nappers, I worked with VPSK, the Puget Sound Nappers up in Washington. And they were wonderful. They had been hosted in Nappin. I sent them a whole bunch of flints. And they hosted in Nappin. And they produced. So there were seven people. And each of the people produced two blade cores. And they sent them back. I also went on to a flint napping blog site and found a couple of other flint nappers who were willing to participate. So I had two additional flint nappers. And then myself and Teresa Barquette, she and I produced five other blades or blade cores in order to analyze and compare these different skill levels. Everybody had to report their skill level. So they're reporting either novice, intermediate, or master. And then basically I used those reported skill levels to create a basic understanding of skill. So I ran all these statistical, I did a whole bunch of statistical analyses to kind of cluster what looked like skill from the reported skill. And then I kind of pulled what I thought was an indicator skill and retested it. And so actually a lot of people got shifted. So a lot of people who had reported to be master had been shifted down, not down, but had been shipped into novice based off of performances that kind of got flagged in these skill indicators. And so I didn't even like I had expected to show up as an intermediate. And like two of my cores were master. And I was like, ha, ha, ha. And the other three were like intermediate. So it was like, it's exciting. Let's see. We're gonna get into the stats here real quick. So I'm gonna try not to get terribly bogged down. And this is where the assigned skill level versus, sorry, the reported versus assigned skill level is important. So for the skill level clusters, we did a K or I did a K cluster. And so what we have are the Z score values. So this is skill people. So we see some people are highly, they're producing blades, core trimming elements, multifaceted platforms very frequently. And irregular blades, which are blades that don't have a very regular form. They're producing those pretty frequently. Regular blades are blades that have straight edges. And then extremely regular blades have multiple parallel lines on the dorsal surface and have a quote like perfect like form, right? Where they taper at the end. They just have this very, they have an extremely regular shape to them. So they just kind of all look like they didn't pop out of the exact same machine, right? And so we see that skilled people are able to produce all of these blade types frequently and unskilled people are not, right? Like they're producing lots and lots of blades, right? So then to kind of push this a little bit further, I split it apart and did the K cluster analysis between novices over here. So we have novices are not really producing blades. They're not really producing core trimming elements all that much or multifaceted platforms. They are producing lots of battering. Lots and lots of battering, which was interesting and actually like when you look at the video, you can actually see it, right? It has to do with like the angles that they're using. So they're battering a lot of these platforms. And it makes sense, you know, I absolutely did the exact same thing. And so then again, kind of have this negative correlation with blades, so regular, regular and extremely low. We have the intermediate people here. You see that they're actually producing a significant amount of irregular blades and a pretty decent number of regular blades and producing blades quite regular as well. And then in the middle, we have the masterful flint snappers, consistently producing all of the blade and core trimming elements and the multifaceted platforms. And then pretty much like they're the main producer of these extremely regular blades and are producing a lot of regular blades. So these are kind of the main non-metric. So these are the main morphological traits that I tested for skill. And so this was the way that I kind of separated out novices, intermediates and masters for the upcoming stats. So some of the things that I tested for, we've got skill, again, questioning skill, multifaceted platforms, really important, right? That was one of those things that was assumed earlier on. One of the questions that I wanted to ask, we see, so this is the mean across all of the, well, basically per core, right? And so we see that masters are producing over a hundred per core on average versus intermediate or novices are producing nine per core. Single faceted platforms, which are non-prepared. So these unprepared platforms where somebody's not actually like shaping the platform before they produce it was pretty consistent, right? Across all of them. So 52, 46, 50, across all of those skill levels. When we look at that blade regularity, we see that irregular blades, this is the mean, so the average per core. Novices are producing less than one on average per core. Intermediates are producing about six, masters about four. When we move over to those regular blades, novices are producing even less, so 0.4 per blade or per blade core on average. Their intermediates are producing six or 7.6 and the masters are producing a lot. They're producing almost like 40 in some cases, right? Sorry, not 40, 19, it's really hard to see. And then on the extremely regular side, it's mostly masters who are producing extremely regular blade cores, right? So it almost 16 blades per core that are extremely regular. So we see that there's the significant shift where masters are much more capable of producing the extremely regular blades consistently and regular blades consistently as well, but intermediate people are consistently able to produce blades, right? I wanted to test the correlation between platform, between platform preparation and blades. So blades, core trimming elements and then irregular blades, regular blades and extremely regular blades. So here we have the Pearson's correlation coefficient for each of those types. So this is a relationship between multi-faceted platforms, the paired platforms and the number of irregular blades. So we have a positive relationship here, the number of prepared platforms and the number of regular blades, a very positive relationship here, the most positive. And then extremely regular blades in the middle. So again, another positive relationship. And then over here on this side, we have those portraying elements which are used to shape that core in order to produce more blades, right? Again, we have that positive relationship between these multi-faceted core or multi-faceted platforms and the number of portraying elements. And here the total blade count per blade core and the multi-faceted platforms here. So we're gonna compare that to the single-faceted platform. So these non-faceted platforms. And we see that there's no relationship really. So there's a negative relationship but here's the irregular blades, not really a relationship. We have a negative relationship between the regular and the single-faceted platforms and other negative relationship between the single-faceted platforms and blades and then not much relationship between the portraying elements and blade counts. I just kind of wanted to present to you the actual like the numbers behind it. So this is for those multi-faceted platforms where we have statistical significance for all of them. And then for the single-faceted platforms, there's no significant relationship between the actual faceting of the blade core and the blades that are produced. Got a couple more to go through. So we've got this punctual blade. So now sequential blades are one or two or more blades that were removed that we fit to each other, right? Which means that somebody took off a blade and then was immediately able to sneak off another, potentially another, right? So there's multiple blades that were removed immediately one after the other. Notably only five of the blade cores were considered master blade cores. So five of five got sequential blade removal, right? The novices, most of them did not have any sequential blade removal. There was 18, yeah, 18 out of over 160 blade cores had refitting removals. And then intermediates, most of them did have refitting, but some of them didn't. So three didn't have any refitting blades or blades on the blades. And then over here, we just have a general overview of the averages for each of the blade cores. So we have clips are most commonly produced. Masters are producing a lot of smaller flakes versus novices are producing less but larger flakes. Blades, we see consistently, masters are always producing more blades or more blades than everybody else. So it's like 38 blades per blade core. Novices are producing one on average and that's rounded up. So producing about one blade per blade core and then intermediates are producing 17. So we kind of have this very clear difference in how much people are able to produce per blade core. And then the core trimming elements I think is the most important here, where we have novices are producing one and usually those are tablets or kind of those earlier stage core, core preparation elements. And then we have intermediates were producing about four, four to six and then we have masters were producing 20. So they're consistently producing these removals that they need to be able to produce in order to create more blades, right? So I think these are very useful ways for us to kind of broach skill. That wasn't all of the stats. So if that these kind of, we'll go ahead and read up here. I'll read some of them off for you. But there was a length width ratio that really only allowed for skilled, unskilled designation. We have length, which is predominantly skilled and unskilled. We have width, which again is predominantly skilled and unskilled proximal thickness was a really great way for us to approach novice, intermediate and master. So this kind of goes back to those multifaceted and single faceted platforms, medial thickness. So the thickness of a particular blade or any removal is also useful for novice, intermediate and masters. So usually if they're consistently thin removals for these blades or kind of indicates skill and it indicates master. Distal thickness kind of in between. So that was about half skilled and unskilled and then half novice, intermediate and master. And then finally, mass. Mass was less useful for determining skill level. You could determine it through novice, intermediate, master, but less on the skilled, unskilled and no indication for these qualitative factors that we can talk about in the beginning, platform preparation. So a lot of platform preparation indicates intermediate and masterful individuals. High blade frequency indicates master. High portraying element frequency indicates masters. High, sorry, sequential blades indicates intermediate and masters. Irregular blades tend to indicate novices or intermediate individuals, regular blades as intermediate and master. Extremely regular is associated with master. Blade cores themselves, so artifacts that can be identified as blade cores with removals or intermediate and masters. And then flake cores are pretty decently associated with novices. I'm gonna say in the experiment, right? Because archeologically flake cores are used for very different things, right? Than blade cores. So with that, I created a skill assessment questionnaire. So that way I could apply all of that information to archeological assemblages. So the first one here. So we have our blade cores present, yes or no. Sequential blades present. So these just kind of go through all of those questions that we, or all of those aspects that I had just outlined in that last slide. And they get points. So basically no, plus zero points. Yes, plus one. These are ranges. So these are based off of the averages that I got those significant averages that I got through the stats. And so novices tending to get like less than 2% of it, of each assemblage as a quarter of an hour, right? So novices need to get zero points here. If it was less than 7%, then that indicates an intermediate one point and then two points for over 8%, right? And so basically I used that information to create this skill assessment questionnaire. Once you add all of them up, if you've gotten zero to five points, you're a novice, six to 11 points or intermediate and 12 to 17 points, you're a master, right? This is kind of fun because then you can kind of rank people as well. So then you can kind of see like, oh, this is kind of a lower range master, right? So some people are scoring like 13 or some people are scoring 12 and it's like, okay, great. Like this person is like skilled, they're intermediate and they're showing off this skill. They're almost there, right? And you can kind of like go back and forth and see like where they rank within that skill level. This I tested by using three cores that I produced. So one I produced when I was first learning how to flint nap, one that I produced in like 2020 when I was kind of getting it. And then one that I had produced after doing like an entire summer of flint napping just gearing up for this project. And so like they fell right in novice intermediate master just Bing Bang Boom. So that made me feel much better about this particular questionnaire. I also, because I'm focusing on caches, also did a cache test where I was looking at the caches and basically created a representative cache and tested it using the same thing. And I was able to tell the difference between skilled and unskilled individuals where like the caches basically, the intermediate cache got moved up. So it was like a low level master's cache and the master cache stayed very high ranking master. So where it had initially I had the entire assemblage it had been intermediate because of the caching event it got boosted up into like a low ranking master. All right, so in the last few minutes so I'm gonna go into these caches and actually like look at the archeology of them. So all of these caches are coming from early epithelialithic assemblages at Paranum. And so here we've got these three caches here which are distinct caches. This is the flint napping floor that I was talking about earlier. And then so we have these concentrations so one, two, three concentrations. So this checkered board pattern here indicates this very unique material it's this translucent flint that I was able to track across various parts of this region and tested that because it was very unique and not a particular material that we see at Paranum very often. So let's see here, the floor that I'm looking at so zero four three is that large flint napping floor. And so that post eights the huts so it's stated after 19,200 years. And then I did pull another cache from another part of site. So this is the area at E, it's also early epithelialithic and the radiocarbon dates underneath of, underneath of zero 14, the one that I'm looking at that's also rated age to 19,200 years. So they're about the same time period. And this one's a little bit earlier most likely than these zero four three in the other site. So really quickly, all of these cache number fours there were seven of them that I focused on. There were seven refit sequences with a total of 30 refits here. None, none, none on two, three and four. Cache number five had 17 refits or sorry had two refits and then one refitting sequence. This clear concentration that I was telling you about with those checkerboards had a total of 199, five of those were refitting in two different sequences. And then that area E cache had a total of 158 with 32 refitting artifacts and 13 separate refitting sequences. So we're going to take a look at these. This is the most highly skilled so the one that we saw in the beginning was the most highly skilled cache. So when we have them in the process have these refits here, these are all refits here the blades, the tools, the blade core itself. And so this one ended up being ranked at 16. So almost the highest rate. So out of 17, it got 16, very masterful. There's sequential blade removals, a diverse array of portraying techniques and in prepared platforms. It's just really went through and kind of showed all of the different techniques and skills that you would need to be considered a masterful core. Again, this is the most masterful out of all of them and we'll kind of look at this, it's the dispersal on the second. Lithic cache number two, this one ranked a little bit lower, this one was at a 15. Again, so this one had a high frequency of thin and prepared platforms and one pair sequential blades. So not as many as previous. It also had a high blade to flake ratio and high proportion of regular and extremely regular blades, which is easier to do when you have a smaller cache. There's issues with the caches that I'd like to explore a little bit further. So number three and number four, these two show the least amount of skill out of all of them. So they come in as a 13, which is the bottom of masterful. So intermediate ends at 12 and masters at 13. And so these two are showing less skill than all of the other caches and concentrations within the area. And they have a high flake ratio, flake to blade ratio, but also not any regular, extremely regular blades. They're mostly irregular. Concentration number five had a score of 14. There's a wide variety of different portraying elements that are taking place here. So that's kind of why it's scored so highly. But there's also a large number of extremely regular blades. Look at concentration number six. One of my favorites, this one, I spent a lot of time refitting. As you can see, there's over like 30 refits here. And they're extremely consistent.  So we see there's sequential blades and significant refits and a lot of different portraying techniques, not to mention a blade tool, which was the only blade tool in all of these caches and concentrations that I had looked at. This is looking at concentration number seven. So that clear material that we were looking at a little bit earlier, obviously that there's a significant presence of portraying elements and lots of little blades and bladelets. They're very regular. So they tend to be regular and some extremely regular blades through here. And then some portraying elements over here.  I just kind of picked up a few of them because they're all coming from different places around the site. This is a concentration of those. So the red had over a hundred of those clear artifacts, those clear-point pieces of debitage. And then this light green area here had about 25 of them. So there's less. But we can see even one of the caches had that clear material in it, which was interesting because they're spatially related to each other within that working floor. Overall, in this particular area, there was over 10,000 artifacts from this red square here. And about between 4,000 and 6,000 in this yellow square and less than 3,000 in this green square. So these are the three that I actually analyzed we can have in four. And then so we see that these computations and the caches are actually placed in those spaces. And so what I ended up kind of determining was that we have likely multiple people represented in this white napping floor. So we have some people who are very highly skilled who are able to produce those 15s and 16s. But then we also have some people who are a little less skilled but still very skilled. So we have people who are producing those 13s and 14s. I think it's most likely that somebody was probably sitting around here and doing that foot napping because anybody who's foot napped knows that all the debitage lands like two feet that way. And so it seems pretty likely that somebody was probably foot napping over here and building up all this debitage over on this side. We have the most skilled cache is actually located right here. And then these two are those, these lower skill caches that we had. So those 13s are showing up there. And then from there, I do believe that foot napping here is a communal behavior or endeavor, right? Where we have at least two foot nappers likely represented between those two different skills, those two different skill levels that we see, although they're both masters, there's that high skill master and the lower skill master. So I think that we're seeing at least two people coming together and possibly more than that. Also from the debitage, novices probably weren't working in this area. And so I want to explore those foot napping floors more thoroughly. I didn't get a chance to be able to do the metric analysis on them. I only did the qualitative analysis on them. And so the qualitative analysis shows that the floors are produced by skilled individuals. So with the ability to go through and do the metric analysis, hopefully I'll be able to kind of tease that apart and maybe see some of those indicators of novices in that space. But without that, basically what I can say at this point is that the novices are not represented within these caches or these concentrations. So yeah, so that was my research. I had a lot of fun doing all like so much foot napping years and years of foot napping and working with a lot of fun people who also got really enthused by foot napping. And I just really enjoyed being able to bring that research and kind of merge it here with the debitage and these assemblages at Piranha Forum. So thank you and got any questions. I'm happy to take them. Can you find the answer there? Part of our thing is that we are left behind by these foot nappers and they're going to remove themselves from the range or what do you think they're working on? Yeah, so I think that there's a potential that the caches are something that people are going to return to. I do also think that there's a potential that they could be winning events as well because the caches are composed of microlytic tools. They're composed of various types of debitage. So they have flakes in them. They have chips in them. But then they also have like portrayal, right? And so they're not just tools. They're not just blades for tool production. They kind of show all of these different aspects of the reduction process, but not the whole unit part of the process. So they notably lack the initial reduction phases. So there's rarely any primary reduction or tablets or anything. It's usually secondary and tertiary reductions that it's showing. So I think it's something that people are likely coming back to, to like modify later and utilize at a different time. Yeah, I think we'll find a solution. Thank you. I think that's one of those kind of fall through. The, you're saying that secondary tertiary reduction is happening in the novice caches as well as in the master caches? Well, so I don't have any novice caches. Like it would be, the all of the caches were in the masterful range. There's just the like less skilled masters and the more skilled masters. And that's the resolution that I have on those. And so all of the caches and concentration themselves generally show at least blades and flakes. And in a lot of cases they usually show blades and portrayal. So there's, there's a range in the center. Did you get the feeling though that like, you know, when I was training in the field job, you know, we were allowed to take bar stock through the mill or the lathe through a certain point as apprentices. And then the master machinists would take over and bring it to fruition as a finished part for a client, right? So they're like, are you getting that sense that the novices were there to do the grunt work? And then the master took over. Yeah, so that's actually one of the things that I want to explore while looking at those wind-epping cores because I know through the experimental work that novices are really capable of producing lots of blades, right?  Like they're producing these massive, beautiful primary flakes like wonderful, right? And so you can hand that labor off and like build up their dexterity, build up their hidden eye coordination and still have them interacting with this. So I do believe that that's absolutely a potential and I want to look more into it. Thank you so much. I knew you were switching on the last part of our live. You were really good. Well, I was just going to say this, but I wanted to ask all of your experimental work, excuse me, to allow you to really see that you're a much more stabby body. It doesn't work a lot to create a home. And you're all, we're all like this.  Would you see any style of this? I mean, I'd like to see in the future. Where? I mean, would you? So you don't have that in the past. Yes. It's a really small community.  I, so style is one of the things that I actually wanted to approach. And it was actually the reason why I did a lot of refitting was to be able to understand style. And with the caches in the area A, so where all the six of those caches and concentrations came from, I wasn't able to make enough refits to really be able to get into style. I will say that the concentration in an area E, right? So dozens of meters away does look significantly different. So the blades are actually notable more narrow and they're produced on like a different, a very different type of plant. So it's this very deep chocolatey brown plant as opposed to the light brown plant that we're seeing in area A. And so there are differences within those, like the six in area A and one in area B. And so that one, I do want to explore more. I know that the cache continues on in a different place and I want to explore that and see how many more refits can come from that reduction there. But I think style is also gonna come up a little bit more effectively in this one. So I think being able to actually look at, because there's over 10,000 artifacts in like, it just looks three, like meters square. And so like to be able to look through and explore this entire area, I think that I'll be able to get a better resolution on style and hopefully identify at least. So I'm not necessarily hopeful for individuals, but I am hopeful for like educational and then interest. Well, I'll say only a little bit. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Ms. Lucia, I was wondering if you were in your industries of the learner, do you also have the next thing that you might find that you're not so lucky to have faculty because you sound like you've been walking forward and you've been thinking about it as it seems like some factors and things that it's not. Yes, yeah, I did. I just didn't present it here because I was a little short on time and there's so many statistics. But yes, so things like hinge, like hinge terminations, step terminations, battering on platforms. So we see battering is associated with novices almost exclusively, but we do see crushing, right? So platform crushing is very consistent in intermediates and master's, right? And so like it's a little bit different in like the battering where you have like multiple attempts to try to break something off of brute force versus crushing where you're just using like too heavy of a camera or something. And so we see a lot of crushed platforms in skilled individuals and not so in novices. Step fractures you see pretty consistently across the board in these blade technologies and that's I think more to do with the nature of the actual like shape of the blade force. And then hinging interestingly was something that I found among skilled individuals. So, but so again, so to note, it just the hinge terminations were found with skilled individuals, but they were also able to fix them, right? And so this is the key point because when we see hinging, that then is unable to be fixed, then that's a novice, right? So hinging that is then fixed is something that shows skill. And so, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, so hinging like, you know, is present pretty much across the board, but fixed hinges are associated with skill. Lisa says, thanks. I thought it was going to be a hard question. Yeah, no, it is. Guys. I just wanted to wish you congratulations and thank you so much. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. It's been so hard. Have you been able to get back to us? Not here, but I'm here for you. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. We're doing great. Oh, yeah. That's a good question. We're doing the future. Cool. Let's get back to you. Thank you. I remember I did it. Yeah, I was out here trying. I still got this.


Hi, I'm Conn from Cancer Dojo, and I make people harder to kill.  Emergency surgery, they said. Boom, I was hit with the feelings of fear, confusion, and helplessness. I had to sign this form that said when I woke up from my brain surgery, I might be blind, I might be deaf, I might not wake up at all. I felt completely helpless at the mercy of the world's most feared disease. And when patients are in this helpless state, our immune systems are compromised, making it harder for our bodies to fight the disease. This vicious cycle compounds over 8.8 million people who have died from cancer around the world every single year. But we can change this dynamic. With the Cancer Dojo Mobile Support Tool, built to shift the patient's mindset from helplessness to actively engaged in their own healing, which is shown to boost the immune function over time and build resilience to enable cancer patients with a better chance of a more positive cancer outcome.  We have recently partnered with the University of Cape Town's Immunology Department to generate further data in this exciting field. To our knowledge, there are no other products like Cancer Dojo that specifically train patients to become more resilient during that healing process. Our target audience is global. There are 40 million people around the world living with cancer. Our app is available on AppStores next week. It has a once-off $80 in-app fee. And for every app downloaded, another one is donated to a cancer non-profit. Our first client, Merck, have pre-purchased the first 1,000 apps for their clients in South Africa and are looking to scale that into North and Central Africa next year. My team and I are all top in our fields. We're all connected by cancer and have a combined skill set of advertising, marketing, behavior change, technology, and cancer survival. We also have two of South Africa's top professors of oncology on our advisory board and 230 pro-bono creators of content around the world. We're seeking $450,000 for 20% of our business to scale Cancer Dojo in terms of reach, product updates, marketing, custom acquisition over the next two years. We're looking for partners who can help us train cancer patients to become harder to kill and increase the global cancer survival rate while decreasing its burden of cost. Thank you. Thanks, Conn. The story is always very compelling. Thank you for sharing. How do you plan on leveraging the B2B partnerships and your revenue model in a very, very short term? So short term, we're using B2B because we have basically put all our funds into the product, which will be available next week. We have very little money for marketing, hence the funds that we're looking for, but our strategy for the next 60, 12 months will be a B2B. So we're aiming at pharmaceutical companies and health insurers to buy bulk apps for their clients using voucher codes, and obviously the more you buy, the less the price. And then once we get marketing, we'll be able to scale it more towards the B2C and people can download it direct from the App Store, which they still can, but we're looking at different versions. I'm going to ask you the same question as before. Yeah. Beyond money, what else can people here in the audience do to help you make this dream come true? So cancer dojo is less a product and it's more of a movement, whereby we can change the way patients around the world, the way humans view cancer. We can change the lexicon from negativity to positivity, start looking at things like gamification, virtual reality, where patients are playing an active role and their own healing is shown to improve resilience and better immune function over time. So it's about collaborating, getting the world to collaborate around using different technologies to solve this problem. Yes, we'll follow up on that. If you think about the thing that's surrounding the patient that's give them all sorts of other messages from the ones you're trying to provide, what are you doing to the related communities other than the patient themselves? I'm sorry, I don't understand the question. What are you doing? Are you affecting practitioners? Are you working with families? Because everyone else has given them a very different message on the one you're trying to provide. Exactly. So we have literally got oncologist on board and it's a tool for oncologists. The second version of the app will provide oncologists with detailed information about how, from a psychological point of view, where their patients are on their journey, how they're feeling. So when an oncologist meets cancer patients coming in, they don't have a lot of time. The cancer nurses, the oncology nurses understand the dynamic between the patient and the medicine. So when they arrive at the doctor, their oncologist knows, okay, this guy is doing his third round of radiation and this is how he's feeling. This is where his head is. This is where his psychology is. He can then create a better relationship. So data is hugely important, but yeah, it needs to happen. Patients around the world need this. Thank you.


Come to the presentation about Kotopaxi Toolkit for Testing IoT Devices. At the beginning, a short introduction about myself. My name is Jakub Botvich. Currently, I work in the Samsung Current Decentre in Poland, where I lead a small team of security pentesters. In recent three years, I have reported more than 30 CVEs to different open-source components, mostly IoT libraries. In my free time, I climb and trek in the mountains, especially ILO of active volcanoes, which inspired the name of the toolkit. I would like to acknowledge also other contributors who added new features or performed quality reviews of the tool. They are listed on the slide. What was the idea for Kotopaxi? One thing is that overall security level of IoT devices is still very low, so there is a lot of testing to do. Another topic is that there are new protocols used mainly in IoT devices, like co-op DTLS or MQTT, and most of these new protocols are not supported by security testing tools. If you look at the slide, you will see the landscape of security tools for IoT devices when we started preparing Kotopaxi back in 2017. There were lots of gaps, and the major tool, Shodan, search engine could be used only for public devices. Currently, the situation changed a little bit for better with the new tools that appeared during last years. But still, when you have a look at specific protocols, there are still multiple gaps to fill. For example, when you run an MAP scan on a device using co-op protocol on non-standard port, you will receive a lot of unknown protocols that are wild guesses based only on port numbers. Similarly, in Wireshark, it supports most of new protocols, but only on standard ports. On the slide, you can see an example of co-op traffic that was shown as an unknown UDP protocol. Only after manual change using the code S function you will receive the coded co-op packets. So when in 2017 our team performed a large-scale assessment of multiple IoT components, we got ideas for new tools, large corpus with malformed packets, and a pack of new vulnerabilities. All of that was used as a foundation for Kotopaxi. The most important information about Kotopaxi is released to the public as an open-source project under GPL tool license. It is available in the public GitHub repository in the Samsung organization. Currently, this is the fourth release of the tool with new features and vulnerabilities. When it comes to this strange name, Kotopaxi is an active volcano in Ecuador, and it's quite an interesting target for climbing. Kotopaxi can be used by different security personnel.  If you're a security researcher, you can analyze network traffic of tested device, identify known vulnerabilities, or check for OEM devices. Finally, if you're a developer or vendor, you can fuzz your devices and check whether they can be used in distributed denial of service attacks. Currently, there are 10 tools in the toolkit, and they support different phases of penetration testing. Starting from the reconnaissance phase, there is a service ping that checks availability of endpoints for specific protocols. The next one is security scanner that allows to verify security properties like cryptography certificates and so on. Deerbuster for resource listing in various protocols. Software Finger Painter that classifies software components used by the server. And the new tool for device identification that passively analyzed traffic and classify devices using machine learning. In the pre-exploitation phase, there are amplification sniffer for detecting traffic amplifiers, protocol fuzzer in two versions for testing clients and servers, and known vulnerability tester also in two versions. Kotopaxi currently support 10 protocols. Three of them were added in this version. These are advanced message queuing protocol, AMQP, MQTT for sensor networks, and the Qwik protocol. I will shortly tell about two of them. Qwik is the new protocol designed by Google and widely used in their applications and IoT devices. It is mainly like TCP and TLS in one with support for multiple streams and low latency and connection setup. And it's also UDP based. The second of new protocols is MQTTSN. This is a UDP clone of the most popular IoT protocol MQTT. It was designed for sensor networks, what is quite popular in IoT world. First and basic tool in the Kotopaxi toolkit is ServicePink. It's used by all other tools to check whether there's an active server of protocol at a specific address and port. It uses a set of payloads for each protocol to test endpoints. This is an extension of usual ports using EndMap. The next tool is ServiceFingerPinter. This is an equivalent to EndMap service and application version detection. However, EndMap works only using server responses comparison for a list of inputs, while Kotopaxi uses machine learning classifier based on a number of requests and responses. The next tool is used for device identification. This is a new feature in this version. It is based on two large corpus of IoT traffic provided by authors of papers listed on the slide. After recording sample of traffic, we can classify all devices that were communicating. But you need to make sure that you have captured all of packets going in and out of device so that the classification results were accurate. The next tool performs resource listing and it's similar to popular DeerBuster but works for a wider range of protocols like Co-op, Multicast DNS, SSDP, RTSP. You need to provide a list of resource names and Kotopaxi will check each of them on the server. There are some predefined lists for each protocol available in the list's sub-director. The next feature is a protocol fuzzer. It is using corpus of malformed packets prepared using Camerican FuzzyLob fuzzer. It checks whether the device crashed after receiving packet or what was the time of packet processing. Usually packets processed longer are more interesting for feather analysis and mutations and can be used for next steps of fuzzing. The next tool is Vulnerability Tester. We have five classes of Vulnerabilities, information disclosures, crashes, traffic amplifications, memory leaks and remote code execution. In this version, we have ten new vulnerabilities that were added to the database and in total 34 issues. Here we can see a sample of vulnerabilities found by us and that can be identified by Kotopaxi. For example, we have here a malformed DNS packet that cause infinite loop in tiny SVC-MDNS server or a single packet that induces six packets in response from the server which can be used for distributed denial of service attacks. And the last but not least tool in our toolkit is the amplification sneer that dumps all packets and analyze input and output of the server, calculate amplification factor for tested device. Short information how IoT devices can be used to perform distributed denials of service attacks it is possible after identifying a large number of vulnerabilities devices that attacker sends packets with spoofed source addresses and device sends responses to victim causing traffic overload. It's possible easily in UDP-based protocols where there is no handshake at the beginning of communications. So UDP-based protocols like co-op or DTLS can be used for such attacks. So finally, before we start the demo, short information what you can do to start with Kotopaxi. First, download the tool from the repository, read the manual and install it. Of course, use it and hack different devices but only when you have a consent of the owner or you are the owner. If you find any errors in the toolkit, pre-support it using GitHub issues. Using the same way, you can contribute new vulnerabilities or new code. So we can now start using Kotopaxi with the first tool named ServicePink. As for all the tools in the toolkit, you can use minus H to receive help. And you can see that for this tool, you need to provide destination address in the first form of hostname, single ID address or multiple addresses by at least separated by a comma or by a mask. Similarly for port, you can use single port, multiple ports with a range or with a list with a comma. We have a test environment here with multiple devices to test. For example, port 3000 with one of the available servers. If you see on the right side, when you try to use Endmap, you will receive information that there is some unknown service on the port. However, when you use Kotopaxi, you will receive information that the server here is empty. Similarly for UDP-based ports, you can also check them in the pink and we will receive information that the server here is caught. And the next tool I would like to show you is the server in that center. Again, we need to provide the IP address on the port and the protocol. And after executing this, we can see that the server was alive and before and after the test. And it was identified as using IO co-op. If we get the verbose, we will see all the packets that were sent and the vector of attributes that was used for classification and finally the result. Okay, we can also check the source listener again. We need to provide the IP address port and for this tool, we need to provide also a list of the resources that we will be looking at the server. And for Kotopaxi, there are multiple lists for each of the protocol and they are provided in the folder Kotopaxi lists. You can see here the results for the following endpoints were found, advanced, advanced, rated, basic, big and so on. And during the testing, the tool also provided a calculated amplification factor for each of the URLs. And you can see that for some of the URLs that amplification factors are quite big. So this endpoint can be used for traffic amplification attacks. In the next test, we will use the setup with IoT light bulb connected with the smartphone hub. As you can see, the light bulb is continuously steered to change the color and the hub is still available using the standard ping. Okay, so we will now ping it using Kotopaxi. You see that it responds to DTLS protocol. So we can now start fuzzing using the protocol fuzzer. So we are using the same IP port and the switch for DTLS protocol. What happened here is Kotopaxi started fuzzing, sent the first packet. The packet was responded. But with the next packet, the hub crashed. So Kotopaxi is waiting for the hub to reload. And after this, the light will continue fuzzing with the next payloads. You can see the lights on the hub. They are showing the current status of the hub. When the light gets dark, the hub is going down. So after each crash, Kotopaxi waits 60 seconds. And the next packet causes a crash. And during the crash, the light bulb doesn't change the color. The corpus is quite big for DTLS protocol. So the whole test could take a really long time. But we can stop it and we will receive information that Kotopaxi found two payloads that caused the crash. And these are the files that are crashing. We can also use Vulnerability tester because we already have the payloads in the database. Okay, so now we see that the hub is running. We can check it with pink. Again, we will see that it responds to DLS. And we can now crash it. You can see that the lights went dark. And the server and Kotopaxi checked that this device is vulnerable to this attack. Yes, and the hub is back again. And now I will show you an amplifier detector to check which services can be used to perform distributed denial of service attacks. We have here a wire shark that will show us the whole traffic. In this window, we will run the amplifier detector. You can see the sent access as follows that you need to provide IP address of the host that will be monitored. And now we will first perform service pink to identify whether the server is really responding. Okay, you can now see the first traffic going in and out. Currently, the amplification factor is very low. But when we start to perform resource listing to the same IP address on the port, we will see some larger responses where the Kotop server will provide some larger data. Okay, and now you have you will see the highest amplification factor was 2048 and it was provided using the following request and response. And when we stop the amplification detector we will receive again the same packet that was the highest amplification factor. Also the resource locator provides us also with information about amplification factor for each of the provided requests and responses. I have already shown you how to use the standard versions of protocol fuzzer and vulnerability tester. Now we used client versions. Okay, so here we have implementation of co-op client and here is the Kotopaxi client protocol fuzzer. We will start it. It will be listening as a server on port 10,000. And now we can start the client. And as you can see client initiated traffic, sent the request to the server and server responded with the payload. As you can see here in Wireshark. When we start initiate the next transmission we will receive the next payloads. We can stop it at any time and see how many payloads were sent. Similarly works the vulnerability tester. It also listened to at a particular port. And when we start a client we will receive information which payload were sent and we can see what happened on the client side. And finally after sending all payloads for this protocol we will receive information and summary. Similarly to the server version we can always see a list of all issues that can be tested using this tool. The next tool I would like to show you is a notification which is a new feature in this version. To use it you need to provide a pickup file with recorded traffic for the host you would like to test. You can see here we have example dump open in Wireshark. We can load just the whole file without showing the IP address and then the tool will try to classify every IP address that is included in this dump and here you see the results for every IP. If there is no one distinct class you will see the whole similar classes with the percentage probability for a larger dumps it is possible to stop loading at any moment and the whole packets that were already loaded will be processed afterwards. Now we can click Ctrl C to break loading and you can see the classification results and finally we can just select one IP address one device to be classified using option minus I and in this case after loading packets we can see only results of classification for this one selected device. Currently device identification tool supports around devices if you have any other device that is not supported yet please send us a pickup file with the dump of the traffic network and we will add it to the next version of Kotapaxi and of course if you see that any device was incorrectly classified also please send us your dump and we will fix it. Thank you for watching presentation demo if you have any questions please ask them using DEF CON chat Thank you.


This is Dennis McMahon and welcome to Positively Vermont. And today my guest is Meredith Angwin, who is a scientist and an expert in her field, an author of a book called Shorting the Grid, The Hidden Fogility of Our Electric Grid. And we just spoke with Meredith back, believe it or not, a year and a half ago about this very important and very readable book and some of the issues facing the state, the region and the country about our electric supply. But first of all, Meredith, would you just give our listeners and viewers a little bit about, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and what you've been doing. Sure. Well, I have a chemistry degree, a master's in chemistry, and I work most of my life in the utility industry in research to help make power plants less polluting and more reliable. In other words, I did corrosion research and pollution control research.  And of course, a lot of the issues that face the utility are common to other utilities. So, you know, the same kind of equipment, the same kind of problems and so forth. So anyway, after I was at EPRI, I ran a consulting firm in corrosion control and stuff, and then after that, later on, I retired and our kids were living on the East Coast and EPRI was, EPRI is Electric Power Research Institute was in California. So we moved here to be closer to the kids and the grandkids. So we have two kids and four grandkids. So anyway, that's where I moved here. And then when I got here, you know, I've been in energy all my life. So I joined our town's energy committee for a couple of years and I was also, I'm also very much in favor of nuclear energy. So I started a blog in favor of Vermont Yankee because when I read the newspapers, they really, I felt that they were very slanted against Vermont Yankee and they didn't give it very as much space in the newspaper as they deserved. They gave a lot of space to people saying it should shut down, but they didn't give much space about the plant itself. So at any rate, I began a blog about it. Well, one of the things about this blog was that the plant had interactions with the grid operator. Now this was not my expertise at that point. This is, we're looking at 2010 here, but I said, well, I got to figure this out. So I would do research and I would write a blog post about the plant in the grid.  And one of the people who was following me was the man who was very involved with the grid governance. And he said, Meredith, you're writing about the grid. Have you thought of joining the consumer liaison group of the grid operator?  So at any rate, I joined it and then I was on the coordinating committee for four years in that group. And that's where I really learned about the grid. You see, before that, I'm a journalist. I worked on materials problems, okay? And I really didn't work on governance problems and so forth. But when I joined that group, I began to see that there were no mechanisms in place in our grid for reliability.  They will say, oh, we search for reliability, but you begin, we are responsible for reliability. So you look at the Northern National Energy Electricity Reliability Console, NERC. And you say, what do you do about reliability? And they say, oh, we do lots of things. We train people. We have rules for how you have to run a substation. We, I said, well, what if an area doesn't have enough power plants for reliability? Oh, that's not our issue. So then you go over to FERC, or I said to you in England, you say, what if an area doesn't have enough power plants for an area? That's not our issue. That's resource adequacy. We don't cover resource adequacy. The states cover resource adequacy. So you see, well, there's no place where you can say, you didn't have enough power plants online. And that's why you had to do black house. There's no place you can stay.  And I got very, very upset about this.  Of course, that's what I do. And I found that I would have to give these long winter talks about the grid and how it was run, because it's a very complicated layer of band aid after band aid to keep it going. That's the only way to describe it. Nobody, nobody, the buck doesn't stop on anybody's desk, but people have been adding new rules and new rules and new rules in the hope that some of these rules will help. And of course, the new rules just mean that there's another set of new rules later to fix those rules. So I found that I couldn't even explain it to people. It was really, really annoying. And I realized that it's just not something you can explain into blog posts or a 10 minute talk. So I decided it really needed a book. And I went around looking for other books that covered this subject and they really didn't. I'm sorry to say they really didn't. There were excellent books on the history of the grid, starting with Thomas Edison and Tesla and, and rural electric cooperatives and all this, but when you got down to how a grid is governed right now, it was very, very empty space. And so I ended up writing this book and it was published in October of 2020. And it had to be, you know, people read it and they liked it. But what happened then, and, and I think this gets into more than the book, it gets into what happened since the book was, what happened then was that Texas had those huge blackouts in February, 2021. And I got emails from people saying, because I'd read your book, I could understand how, how it happened in Texas, what the sequence was in Texas. And I said, Oh, that's good. And all of a sudden, you know, there were people who wanted me to be on podcast people I hadn't heard of.  I'm in Vermont. I mean, it made sense. But all of a sudden it was like, you know, all kinds of people. And the reason is that as I said, there was a blank space where understanding how the grid was organized was, and this book filled a big part of it, not all of it. It can't fill all of it. You would need a thousand page book. This is 400 pages. And you would need a thousand page book. And anyway, I want to say one more thing before we go on with this. And that is, of course, I had readers who read it while I was in the process of writing it. And what they all said was, you need a glossary. And I did. I absolutely needed a glossary. And I think I'm as proud of the glossary in this book that explains all the infinite acronyms that are used on the grid, as much as anything else. Because if all you had of the book was the glossary, you would at least be able to get a clue about the headlines. So I have to tell you, this is like cramming for an exam. I read this book the night before our interview in December 2020. And not only did it go fast, and I had the time to make all kinds of initial variations, but I found it very readable. And for someone not in the field, it was very informative. And it's really a great job. And the rest is kind of history. And that's what I think we're going to do next time. There's a lot of neat in here about the problems, the issues, the solutions. Just give us a rendition of what has happened in your field. And maybe with the book since we first discussed it. Well, let's say that when the book first came out, some of the people who, some of the people in particular who worked in, in, in, in grid issues. Claimed I was being alarmist or, or whatever. And oddly enough, they retracted that somewhere after Texas. And, and, and so I would say that what has happened since then is that the issues on the grid that nobody having true responsibility for reliability. And I've really come home to roost. And one of the things in my book is I have a section based on a presentation that James Brian of energy tariff experts gave to the consumer liaison group when I was a member of it. And you can find that presentation on the web. So, you know, it's referenceable. But one of the things he noticed was that yes, the price of natural gas had gone down, but the price of electricity had not followed it down. And, and, and when he said is that we've gotten away. Well, he didn't put we've gotten away. We have added many things like paying for renewable energy credits and all kinds of things to a consumer's bill. But it hasn't come back to punch us. Well, he didn't put it that way. That's me. Anyway, this is my rephrasing. It hasn't come back to punch us because the natural gas prices are low, but we have used up all the leeway that those low natural gas prices have given us. And when natural gas prices go up, it's going to be the consumers are going to really be, you know, hit by it. And, and, and that's sort of what's happening now.  There's a shortage of natural gas sort of worldwide. And electricity prices have, have, have followed them up because we have used up our, our leeway review. By investing in other things that don't add to the reliability of the grid. I'm going to say another thing about the grid. I, I, I, when I wrote the book, if you remember at the beginning of the book, or you're supposed to have memorized it, you understand, I described two grids. I say there's a physical grid, which consists of wires and substations and control room, which keeps the grid completely in balance. And then there's a policy grid. And the policy grid is about how power plants get paid. But it comes from big policy decisions, like for example, that renewable plants get, can get renewable energy credits, which pay them separately from whatever money they get on the grid. So you will have a bill and it may say there's only, this portion of the bill is the energy portion and this portion is distribution. But that isn't quite fair because what's going on is that the distribution part also includes what your distribution utility is paying for renewable energy credits. So to some extent your distribution charges include hidden costs for the renewables costs. And so that's what I mean by I ended up having to, to write a book about it because, you know, this is, this does not, you know, then somebody's going to say, well, why do they have these renewable energy? Well, there's a new renewable portfolio standard. Or anyway, it gets to be a fairly complex situation. And I also wanted to say that since I wrote the book, I realized that people don't know much about the power grid, the actual physical grid, but they know, they know even less about the policy grid, except for some vague ideas that we're encouraging renewables and exactly how that works in terms of their bills or in terms of percentage energy costs to other costs or whatever. And so forth. So there's a lot of, I wrote the book partially to help people understand these things and to be able to make their own conclusions based on the facts. But since then I've come up with an idea for, there's a third grid and you said, you understand there's only one grid out there with wires. I'm not imagining there are three grids out there with wires, but there's the grid out there with wires. So the grid of how power plants get paid and what policy decisions are made.  And that's what you read about in the paper. We could have batteries. We don't have them yet, but we could. We could have transmission lines that run all the way across the country. We could have a unified grid all over the country. We could have a hundred percent renewables. We could, you know, there's a breakthrough in batteries. No, there isn't. If there is, you know, everybody is following the could grid. And the trouble is that some of those things can happen. Some of those things can happen in the future, but the future is based on the past. And you have to know what's happening now to have an idea of how, how, or whether it can transition to this could grid. So anyway, I've been really concerned about the fact that the could grid is the one everybody knows about. And the could grid is basically can include nuclear. If we had planned for it. I think that I follow what's going on in Britain right now that Britain has taken the initiative of having many nuclear power plants. And that's extremely serious, possibly with an older infrastructure than ours, but they're going at it. They're working. Absolutely. And a lot of places in Europe sort of, especially in Europe, sort of woke up because they said, wait a minute, we can't count on natural gas from Russia. And even if we can't count on it, we're paying Russia the money to invade Ukraine. We don't like this. So they really want energy independence, energy security in a way that two years ago, people were in this sort of happy world of, it's all globalized and everybody's agreeing and so forth and so on. And there was always a problem with that viewpoint, even before the Ukrainian invasion of Ukraine. And that is, okay, we're not at war with, with Canada, and we're unlikely to go to war with Canada. Nevertheless, Canada, like any sovereign country, takes care of its own people first, which means that when we have a very bad cold snap here, Canada lowers the amount of energy it exports to us. It took me a long time to try and figure this out. At first, I noticed it. And then I read a footnote on one of the winter reliability reports from our grid operator, which said that Canada only took on a supply obligation for about half the amount of electricity Quebec that is not all of Canada. Quebec only took on a supply obligation for about half the electricity that it usually supplies us, which means that if, if there's a cold snap, it could cut to half the amount it was exporting and it wasn't breaking any of the rules that it signed up for. And so when people begin saying, oh, well, you know, in a cold snap, we can count on Canada. I'm like, have you been looking at what goes on? I mean, no, Canada will, Quebec will take care of the people in Quebec first. And they should. They're not in the charity business to help out New England while people in Quebec can't get enough heat. Well, actually, this show is being reported on May 26. And what motivated me to do a follow up and not realizing it's been a year and a half was the power situation in Quebec over the past weekend and in Ontario. Because of storms and the weather conditions, power outages hundreds of thousands of people in that province alone. Yes. Yes. And could that happen here? I'm just curious. Well, the answer is that my book is mostly about resource, what you would call resource adequacy. Are there enough power lines? Are there enough transmission lines? What happened in Quebec and was huge storms? And yes, of course that could happen here. I mean, storms can happen in Quebec. They can happen in New England. They can happen in the Gulf states. Storms are a hazard. The question for me is how quickly can you get back up after a storm? That depends on having enough power to put on the lines. And that is the concern that I spent most of the book on. But another thing that's worth saying about this is that do you think Quebec was exporting to us when all those storms were hitting? No. So you can't really count on your neighbors to save you. They're going to solve their problems first. And they should. What do you see now are potential solutions? What can we in Vermont do? What could we do in the region? What can we do in other parts of the country to deal with this? The hidden fragility of the electric grid. What could we do to compensate in the near future? I think the first thing to do is to stop shutting down nuclear plants. I think that's the first thing to do. I think that's the first thing to do. Because nuclear plants are very, very steady. And they are kind of a backstop for the rest of the grid. And there's going to be somebody who's going to write you and say, no, no, nuclear plants are baseload. And we don't need baseload anymore. Well, actually. I've been just seeing some studies of New York state. And New York state includes New York city. All those areas, New York city and the rural areas, 60% of the electricity which is used is electricity that is used 24 hours a day, 60 to 70%. So if we had baseload of nuclear for 60 to 70%, we would have a far less dangerous situation with, with whether we could meet load. Okay. So the first thing is not to, to, to shut down nuclear plants. The second thing would be to understand that perfection is not possible. So let's say that you say, we want very clean electricity. So we're only going to allow nuclear natural gas. Well, natural gas is delivered just in time and things can disrupt it. Things from things such as a pipeline compressor having a problem. Another thing would be that it's a cold snap and houses are using a lot of natural gas to heat. Utilities that supply gas to houses make what's called firm contracts with natural gas because they don't want to leave their homes and the lurch. Utilities that burn natural gas to make electricity. That is electric utility electric power plants. They generally make interruptible contracts with natural gas, because first of all, it's cheaper. And secondly, they know that the utility will, will not. The power plant will, will can go offline if it wants to, unlike a house. Okay. A house doesn't want to just, okay, I'll go, I'll be going cold now, whatever, but a power plant could go offline because they're merchant plants and they make money when they sell power, but if they can't get the gas, they go offline. So that is a really important, important thing. So anyhow, I just thought I'd, I'd put that out there. About natural gas being kind of a dangerous thing to rely on. So what we need is allowing oil to be stored on site. Now our grid operator made a winter reliability program encouraging power plants to store oil on site by subsidizing the oil on site. But then, then, you know, the advocates of, of, of, of, of, you know, we're going to, we've got to do absolutely everything in our power to, to stop global warming. We're like, no, not oil, you're not allowed to burn oil. Well, you have to burn oil because otherwise you're going to have a real problem with, with power plants are not being able to make power. So I just feel like you can be against this or against that, but, but think about how, how it will affect people. When Texas had its blackout, people died. I mean, that's really important to remember, at least in my opinion. I'll tell you, we're actually have only a minute or so left. And this has really been, been fascinating. And what, what you suggested as a title today, which we're going to use is the fragile grid comes home. And if you could just tell us what you predict or what should be done in the, in the next time. And we're going to try to get you back as this picture develops over the course of time. What, what do you feel is, is the next step? Well, my next step is to be a. And I think it's really important to remember that. Honor our reliable power plants of both the nuclear plants and dual fired gas plants that can store oil on site and not just keep hammering them and hampering them and thinking it's all going to be okay, because it won't be okay. And what's happening right now is the NERC, the. Federal reliability, electric reliability console. And we're expecting that this summer, the chances of rolling blackouts in the Midwest are, are high. So you see, we had rolling black, we had rolling blackouts in, in Texas, which actually couldn't roll because they had so much trouble that they ended up with instead of a one hour blackout. And then it goes to a different area. They ended up blacking out people for 40 hours. And we came very close to rolling blackouts on our own grid, which I wrote about in my book. So NERC for the first time I've ever seen it is predicting a high probability of rolling blackouts in the upper Midwest. And so what I'm saying is we have become too dependent on just in time natural gas. We have been scornful of plants that like nuclear plants that keep fuel on site. A nuclear plant has 18 months of fuel on site. And we have got to get back to encouraging, keeping the nuclear plants that keep fuel on site, not being, keeping power plants that have fuels we don't like, like oil or coal available for the cold weather. And I mean, we really have to take the reliability of the grid seriously. That's what it has to be. Once we begin to realize the reliable grid is the basis of modern health and safety, then we will make some decisions that are reasonable. The decisions can be for low carbon grids, nuclear slow carbon and so forth. But they can't be like, we've got to be 100% low carbon, whatever happens to the people around here. So is that a help? Yeah, it sounds like a flexible approach, but people have to study this. I think this book is really a great primer on what needs to be done or what has gone wrong. But for the future, it's certainly a starting point. Thank you very much. I really felt obliged to write it because I felt that I was finding out things that affected everybody's life. And I couldn't explain it to people in a short manner. And I tried to write it so that it was at a really readable level. Well, it certainly is. What we're going to be doing is we'll be following this because it's in the news every day. There's news out of Canada this morning. There's all kinds of things going on. Of course we have the war and we have the whole issue of the supply and rushing all that. So we will be following this up and we will be in touch. And hopefully we might have a better power picture in the near future. Thanks to people like you who are keeping us aware. Thank you very much. And I just want to note that this is Dennis McMahon and this has been positively Vermont. My guest has been Meredith Anglin of Vermont, the author of shorting the grid, the hidden fragility of our electric grid. And our topic today has been the fragile grid comes home. Thank you for watching. Thank you.