Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we are joined with Alexander Zaychik Alex who's speaking to us from the United States. And we're going to discuss Mr. Bill Gates recent statement that actually intellectual property protection is not the issue on the question of vaccine manufacture. And it needs, as he said, our money and our expertise before a factory in India can produce vaccine because he gave it as an example. But that was really the crux of what he's been arguing for a long time, that it's western knowhow which has to come before anything can be done in the global south. Alex, you've been studying this issues for a long time. And you've also written an article on his, this particular in your Mr. Bill Gates and how he's been looking at this issues. Bill Gates is a bit of an iconic figure in the United States. So how does, how do things like this when stated, in fact, in India, the response has been that this is a racist statement. How does the western audience of the US audience look at this kind of statements? I think that there is a turn taking place where people are beginning to be internationally minded enough to consider the view from elsewhere. And people are understanding that this is in fact a racist statement, and that there's a lot of condescension involved.  You know, people are learning more about the vaccine industry. People are starting to understand that many vaccines were already being produced around the world. And there's no reason why countries like India and other countries cannot produce these vaccines. And they're starting to ask questions that are rather uncomfortable for Gates and his allies, who are also, you know, quite frankly, the companies that don't want to give up their intellectual property, which is what he's addressing when he makes these statements. Of course, the Gates empire is built on intellectual property of Microsoft. So to his understanding, intellectual property would be the linchpin of his empire. And therefore, it sounds when it is transported into health, really the larger attempt to keep what shall we say, the hegemony of intellectual property to the western world. That's at least the broad sense that we get from here. But you know, this is very much a debate that I thought was put to bed in the nineties, when it and early 2000, when it came to the AIDS epidemic, because this is exactly the kind of situation arguments that were given then. And the argument was that philanthropic money, Western aid would cover what the African continent, for instance, or Asians would require. And we should really depend on handouts and not try and develop medicines for ourselves and break the intellectual property rights regime, which is what underpinned this whole monopoly of the pharmaceutical companies or what we call the big pump. So do you see that? Is this sort of does this resonate with the AIDS debate? Or do you think that this is something which the connections are yet to be made? No, I think that's absolutely right. These issues should have been put to bed. With that moral catastrophe to quote the director general of the WHO, in the context of COVID, the lessons should have been learned. And the fact that we're having to revisit these fundamental moral issues of the right to medicines is quite an unfortunate thing. But the echo is clear, and the issues are the same. And here we are 20 years later, which is a testimony to the power of the industries that forced through the regime that led to the African AIDS crisis with regard to medicines. That was three industries basically. It was pharmaceuticals, it was entertainment, it was software. And one of the companies that lobbied very hard for that WTO regime, known as TRIPS, that now is the center of so much debate, was Microsoft. Bill Gates was active in the pushing through of the system that we are now reckoning with. And that has been lost over the last 20 years as he's built up this image, as this great philanthropist who has engaged in this selfless crusade to bring vaccines to poor and middle income countries. But I think now we're starting to have the clarity that we need to see his true role as an ally and runner of interference of this industry and of this system that has failed again and again. And until we have that clarity, we're not going to get past this failure. We're not going to get past the system, which has proven incapable of meeting human needs and public health crises like the current pandemic. You know, the Doha declaration as you're referring to was the one which is supposed to settle this, that okay, in WTO there is an exception of epidemics or a public health crisis when intellectual property could be broken or could be bypassed. Now, that was a post again by the rich countries that the big pharma that was pushed through because it was completely unacceptable what was happening, the pricing and so on. But at that time, we had a huge ally in the West or in the home countries of big pharma, which was the AIDS affected patients because they wanted cheap medicines as well and also the empathy of all AIDS patients around the world. The global solidarity was a huge positive force. This time, that is not really there. There is no constituency which is affected similarly and which is arguing for cheap vaccines because you see that at least in the home countries, these countries in the United States, the European countries which have been opposing, any relaxation on intellectual property on the question of vaccines in WTO are also willing to get vaccines for free. They are socialists at home and capitalist abroad on the question of vaccines. So that is of course also because most of the vaccine development has come from public sector money. So they have at least that card to play at home. But it is interesting that when it comes to the other places, other countries and so on, that kind without that kind of constituency, how do you see the debate in the West shaping up? Because really, it is as much about countries in the global south. How do you see the West or the global North constituencies within that playing its role? Well, I think there's two avenues there for changing views in the United States, for example, where I am right now. I think one is to tap into a sense of moral obligation which can resonate here not as much as we would like necessarily, but it does exist. And the second avenue is self-interest which is to explain to people which I think people understand at some level is that the world is very small in 2021. And until, as all the global leaders have said, everyone is safe, nobody is safe. So there's an understanding that as variants emerge that it will risk undermining the health and safety of countries that have higher vaccination rates. And I think that is probably more fruitful in terms of getting political momentum towards lifting intellectual property restrictions than the sense of moral responsibility. But I would pursue both and I see both taking place, both of those conversations are happening and they need to be amplified. Alex, one last question for you. How do you see Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates role, particularly in WHO? Because WHO had an alternate model, the CTAP model, which asked for patents to be put, intellectual property to be put. It's not about patents alone. Patents are a small part of the much larger intellectual property regime we are talking about, which is really know how sharing knowledge, that's the fundamental issue. But that was completely sabotaged by what Bill Gates, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation did. And what we have today, in fact, is that that patent pool idea is just dead. Yeah, unfortunately Gates played quite a significant role in undermining the momentum that was building towards a CTAP type IP pool that was going to be matched with a tech transfer mechanism. Because as you mentioned, it's obviously a bigger issue than just patents. We were going to require a truly global solidarity effort that was going to either force the companies to share their know how or create a pool where they were doing so on their own, which was the less likely scenario. But Gates basically showed up with the act accelerator and said, no, that's not necessary. Just trust us, trust the companies, just let the market forces plus a little sprinkling of philanthropy solve the problem. And a lot of people anticipated that that was not going to be enough. And they were saying so quite loudly very early on in the pandemic. And there's really no excuse for not listening to those voices because they turned out to be right. And their arguments were based on history and a very sophisticated analysis of how the world works and how this industry functions. And history is not going to look kindly on them or those who enabled them. And unfortunately Bill Gates counts in that column. In fact, Dawksford vaccine was originally planned to be made to be shared to all. And in fact, it's being transferred to AstraZeneca. It appears that Mr. Gates and his foundation later be grown in that as well. Yeah, that was a shame. And especially when you think back to the history of Oxford that they were trying to live up to. Look at penicillin during World War II, which was a comparable global crisis, they were developing penicillin and they brought it to America and they had a chance to patent the product or the process at that point. And they did shows not to. They kept it in the public domain and the US government at the time did as well. And they basically contracted with some companies, but the governments were in the dominant partner. They were the senior partner and the companies just made this stuff. And they made as much as possible. And it was a success. It was an example of the public sector, you know, developing a breakthrough medicine and not letting intellectual property slow down maximum production for a global crisis. And that model should have been adopted in the context of COVID. And it was not. And there's no good reason that it wasn't other than, you know, fealty to what is a fundamentally unjust and indivensible system of private profit over the public. It's interesting, Alex, when you talk about antibiotics, penicillin in particular, that this was also the battle in India in the 50s. And in fact, the American multinationals, the British multinationals fought a bitter battle to see the public sector in India does not develop antibiotics, because at that time, antibiotics was much costlier in India than even in the United States. So that was the battle we had to fight. And at that time, the pharmaceutical companies, I don't remember which one at this moment. In fact, one of the persons in the Senate hearing said, we are a part of the strategic battle against the Soviet Union. And in India, we have recently won a battle like this, where we have stopped a pharmaceutical public sector company from making antibiotics. So this is really a rehash of a much older battle that seems to be going on. And unfortunately, for us, Mr. Bill Gates brings the hat of a philanthropist today, and not the hat of a pharmaceutical spokesperson. That is also the problem that we seem to have. And therefore, his legitimacy, particularly the role he plays in WHO is, I think, something that we have to now contend with. And unless we are able to delegitimize his position as the global spokesperson for public health, we're going to have a tough time. Alex, thanks for being with us so late at night where you are and speaking to us on what is, I think, going to be a very important topic for our discussions in the future. Please do see, do click, and also visit our website.


With forward pay from Appalachian Wireless, you'll avoid contracts and credit checks while taking advantage of some awesome perks, like unlimited talk, text, and three gigs of data for just $44.99, or with five gigs for a mere $59.99. Forward pay, that's today's Appalachian Wireless. 40-year-old Angela Polly and 51-year-old Michael Sloan, both of the Millard area in Pike County, were indicted this week on a Class C felony charge of adult exploitation. The charge stems from an incident in early August during which Polly, with the help of Sloan, allegedly attacked a disabled elderly resident of the Myers Towers apartment complex in downtown Pikeville. In this case, the city police got a complaint that Angela Polly had assaulted this man while she was stealing money from him. And whenever they went to Myers Towers where he lives, they were already gone. Pikeville police began investigating the incident and they were led to Angela Polly, who is a family member of the alleged victim. We obtained video footage from the Myers Towers housing complex that we used to identify the female and she was identified as Angela Polly. The video surveillance also showed that Sloan allegedly played a part in the crime against the victim, most notably blocking a good Samaritan who attempted to intervene and help the victim. Almost like in basketball, he blocked him out so that he body checks him so that he can't get over to where the assault is taking place. Officials said the circumstances of the case, the victim's age, health and the crime allegedly committed, made the exploitation charge appropriate. Adult exploitation is a special statute that is protecting adults that maybe have a mental or physical disability that make them particularly vulnerable to some type of theft or some type of abuse. And the significance of this is that the legislature made this a Class C felony, carries up to ten years in prison. So this is an attempt to protect these people that need extra protection because of their problems. This is something that we can't tolerate. These people have given their lives to our communities and it's time for us to stand up for them and we need to make sure that they're taken care of. Whether Angela Polly or Michael Sloan are in custody at this time in Pike County. Reporting in Pikeville for EKB News, I'm Chris Anderson.


Hello, I'm here from administration. I'm here to discuss what you've been through. Where have you been? What happened? Well, I'll start with the admission, right? Your side head and I were sure I could administer lots and already a bad idea, but that's our job. A very difficult task to be sure. Exactly. And surprise, surprise, it goes wrong. I go through the portal to chase Mr. Lost. It takes me to the other world. It's a other dimension. I regularly explore other dimensions. And anyways, I hear a truth behind me. Portal closures. I don't know why that happened, but basically the machine that traded the portal came through with me but it was broken. So I spent the next three weeks trying to repair it and I thought I was going to die but I got back, but apparently it's been ten months, which is still kind of processing. So what you're saying is that time travels differently in the place you were than here, assumingly? Yeah, I figured, yeah. I mean, it certainly didn't feel like ten months. You look great. Thank you. It's nice of you. I haven't showered in three weeks. I didn't mention the smell, but you look great. I'm sure, yeah, I know. The first thing I did is throw me in here and get any food or go to the bathroom. Well, decontamination from other dimensions, security rest, XYZ. You know how it is. I know how it is. I know how it is. It would have been nice for a little more hospitality, I suppose. I've worked here for a while. I feel like I'm just here for a bit. I did get a three musketeers last week. God bless your heart. Three musketeers. Is that your favorite candy by chance? It is. My favorite designer was Christian. Three musketeers. You have news actually. Oh, is that Jello? Can I have it? It's a shot. A shot? I would love it if it was a Jello shot. It's from Elizabeth.   They're testing you for the next 48 hours. 48? Yeah, I know. Okay, all right. Listen, I may be able to expedite this process. Oh, yes, please. I've got a series of questions to confirm your identity. What is your name? David Smith. What is your favorite color? What is the speed velocity of unladen swallow? African swallow. All right, very good. Now we'll move on to the actual questions. What is your date of birth? Day, month, year. August 21st, 1989. August 21st, 1989. Now, how long have you been in a relationship with Dr. Elizabeth Taylor? Three years. Well, I don't know if it's four now. Three or four, give or take a time loop. Yeah, exactly. Ten months. There is a name that Dr. Elizabeth Taylor has for you a pet name. Bear Bear. Bear Bear? Yeah, I don't really like it. But I call her glasses, which I think is cuter. Bear bearing glasses, how adorable. I'll be in touch. Thank you. Thank you so much. Please, if you could expedite this, I want to get out of here. I really appreciate that. I will do what I can, David. Thank you so much. I see that you were the one who contained David after his arrival, correct? Yes, that was made correct, yeah. Can you confirm your name and rank for the chat? Yes, I am Agent G.O. I am an MTF Omega 13 agent on loan to this site. Working under Blaine for now. Can you confirm for me some details about David we may or may not have heard from his mouth? Yes. Do you know David Smith's birthday? I know David Smith's birthday. Do you know it? I do not know David Smith's birthday. Do you have it in file in his personnel? I don't. This man is not good at keeping files. I personally write everything down and hold it, but he doesn't do so. He doesn't even have a desk. Hmm. I would ask perhaps Civil Elliot or Agent Smith's girlfriend, Elizabeth Taylor might know this information. All I know is that he's a wannabe in Diana Jones. I saw the jacket in the hat. He's a great agent. He's not a good agent. Do you have any intel on how long he and Dr. Taylor have been dating before I move on? Yes, I believe including this ten months that he was absent. It's about two years, I would like to say. Something around there. Interesting, interesting. During which time he's had also a suspiciously close relationship with the CPs or a family. Very interesting. If you find out any more information on that, let me know. We'll do what we can with our administration privileges. Excellent, thank you so much. Thank you kindly. Godspeed. Well, something is a mess. Three to four years or two. Let us welcome to research, everyone. Hi, welcome. I'm Danny Taylor. What's your name? Danny Taylor, you can call me Sherman. Sherman, nice to meet you. I'm Joe Williams. Pleasure to meet you, sir. Pleasure to meet you, Joe. Do you have anything in particular? Just getting to know the research here. I see you're with admin. Taking a small tour of the facility. Oh, yes. Touring facility, picking up slack. You could always use some extra help with admin. My highlighter's back. Great. People keep taking all my pencils for some reason. I can't imagine why. This is my sister, Dr. Elizabeth Taylor. She's the head of research. Good to know. Good to know. Anything cooking in the research department we should know about? Any interesting projects? I mean, you were looking into David's reappearance. Did you see who came in? We, in fact, had a chat with David. Oh, you did? You did, yes. He's my sister's fiance. He had been gone for ten months, finally returned, and now he's in quarantine. Yes, could I have a smaller side with you? What is it? Sorry. So, David claims that the time he has been gone, which is how long again? That's his claim. Is it ten months, isn't it? Isn't the phrase three weeks he's been gone? Isn't that what I'm hearing from security? How about security today? That is what security's saying. Am I right, critical hazard assessment team? And it's scary, Oreo, 2022 now. Ten months? Ten months. Interesting. All right. All right. Then, the second thing we said, he mentioned things like his favorite color, the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow, things that weren't really pertinent to the conversation. I don't know why he brought them up. But he did, in fact, mention that you guys had been dating for a certain amount of time. I was hoping you could confirm that time scale for me. How long have you all had a relationship? Three years before he disappeared, so three or four, depending on how long he's been gone? Okay. Okay, good to know. Glad to keep these things straight. And my final question of things I discussed with David Smith, if you were to have a pet name, a nickname for him, what would, what might that be? To call him Bear Bear? Okay. And he used to call you Glasses, I assume. What is going on? You're funny. You're funny. Okay. Okay, this is interesting information. Thank you for that. I'm going to have to clarify a few things, but... Chris has a mask. Those two? Well, I'd say this would be more adorable off of work hours, but... I would agree. Office romance, I guess. Thank you for your time. I will return this. Alright, so perhaps the other security officer was wrong, but Elizabeth Taylor did give us full information matching what David Smith said. I apologize. I missed one question I had to clarify with you. Agent Smith's birthday. August 21st. August 21st. Thank you. The last day of Leo season. The last day of Leo season. Oh, I can see that for him. Thank you for listening.  Please become a patron or visit our merch store at the link in our bio to support our work. Secure. Contain. Protect.


So I'm just down here with my crew. We're moving the mess we can to help along with the fishing and gathering the fish. And then we're mainly down here to help sling the fish. We're on each one here at Big Bar. So this is kind of around where we do all of our staging in the morning. And then we kind of spread out to a couple of different beaches here. I think it's good to be really successful to help save the run of salmon that's going through this year.


Novak Djokovic vs. Andrei Rublev is the second semi-final for the men's Paris Masters for 2023. And both guys have been impressive to get to this stage. Rublev entered the tournament as the number 5 seed and will get a buy in the first round. In the second round he take on the qualified Nisyoka. But this is no problem getting through in straights. 6-4, 6-3. In the third round he take on another qualifier, Van Duzantul. Who had just taken out Tommy Paul in the previous round. But again, no problem for Rublev getting through in straights. 6-3, 6-3. In the quarter-finals, Rublev will take on Alex Dimino of the 13th seed. Who had just got a walk over against Yannick Sinner in the previous round. And after dropping the first set, Rublev would fight back to win 4-6, 6-3, 6-1 to advance to the semis. Djokovic entered the tournament as the number 1 seed and will get a buy in the first round. In the second round he take on Etcheverry. There's no problem getting through in straights. 6-3, 6-2. In this third round he take on Grigsbor. Who had been having a pretty good week. And after dropping the first set, Djokovic would fight back to win 4-6, 7-6, 6-4 to get to the quarter-final. In the quarter-finals, Djokovic would take on the number 6 seed, Runa. Who is the defending champion having beaten Djokovic 12 months ago in the final here. And after dropping the second set, Djokovic would fight back to win 7-5, 6-7, 6-4 to advance to the semifinals. These two have played 5 times before with Djokovic leading the head to head 4-1. Including winning their last 3 matches, 2 this year and 1 on hard court. They also played at the Nido finals last year with Djokovic getting a straights win on the indoor courts. If Rublev is going to win this one, he needs to play aggressive and keep his cool. Now Djokovic has had a couple of matches now where it's been very very tight. So Rublev should take some confidence from that, be aggressive, see what Runa did, come to the net a bit and be unpredictable and maybe get Djokovic off guard. If Djokovic is going to win this one, he needs to get off to a better start than he has. He did alright against Runa, got off to a good start and then kind of let the second set go. He needs to get off to a good start and keep it. He can beat Rublev, we've seen it this year and he has to get off to a really good start and keep the momentum going into the next sets. This is such an interesting matchup because Djokovic seems a little off the last couple of matches and Rublev, he's been in great form lately but I've got to go with Djokovic in this one to win in three sets. I think Rublev might be able to sneak a set but I think Djokovic is going to take it in three and make the final but let me know down in the comments below. Who do you think is going to win?


Welcome to road gear reviews. My name is Kaylee and I'm Josh and we are from the YouTube channel and blog the freedom theory and today We are reviewing living the RV life written by Mark and Julie Bennett from RV love. Stay tuned So welcome back you guys so many of you know Mark and Julie from their wonderful blog and YouTube channel RV love comm And they also completed the RV success school, which is an amazing course on Living the RV life. They then got snatched up by some publishers to write the ultimate guide on Living in an RV. So we are gonna jump into this review The first thing that I want to say is that this is the book that I wish we had when we started RV We when when Kaylee and I got the idea to RV we got on YouTube We got on blogs and everything that we saw was very very pro RV just Nothing could go wrong. Everything was going to go right, you know, you'll live for $200 a month save Then when we found out that wasn't the the way things actually were We and a lot of other people went the other direction and really tried to show the you know the Cons to RVing and you know, we tried to show the pros Their book does such a great job of balancing that out and showing you the amazing things that you can Define and do and see by living in by living the lifestyle But also showing okay, these are some of the challenges that you might face and yeah and doing it like that I mean it was such a wonderful balance. So when you read it, you're inspired But you're also going into it saying, okay I know that this might happen or this might happen just such a wonderful balanced approach I bench read it even though we've been RVing for What close to four years now before years in January. Yeah, I bench read it This is the book that I wish we had so if you're thinking about RVing at all If you're planning to one day in the future If you ever think it might be on your radar, this is the book to read And this book really is written for someone who is looking to enter the lifestyle I think this is a great book to have even if you are a full-timer of year I find myself picking it up looking at pictures and also I felt really inspired when I was reading through it I was like, oh man, we live this life Like we have this incredible opportunity and you know, we've been stationary for a little while So this kind of kicked into high gear when you catch up and go and it brought up that excitement again that Wonderless that we have and I think if you've got that wonder less Maybe if this is a far-off journey or you're looking at doing it in the next couple of months You're gonna want this book I really resonated with the chapters that covered the emotional transition and I really felt like that gave a really clear Perspective of what you're gonna come up against when you do hit the road. That's something when I first started RVing I was very passionate about I made videos about that and I think there's again There's this resurgence of RVing and I think it's important that once you move into this very exciting lifestyle that you're gonna come up against these emotions that they discuss and you might have pushed back from family and friends and When you're with the love of your life and y'all the sudden you're in 38 feet You might want to figure out ways to get your own time and know how to put on headphones Yes, that was one of the tips that was in this book was get big headphones and you know So Josh has noise reduction headphones. I have noise reduction headphones It covers RVing with kids it covers travel planning and I don't want to spoil the book But it's real good something that I loved about it is that it is chock-full of resources So they cover a lot of areas like road schooling if you're planning on going on the road with your kids Some of the pros and cons but then they point you to resources on that topic They point you to Full-time families, which is an RV group for full-time families obviously Yeah, which we're a part of now, but when it comes to mobile internet They give you a high-level overview and then they point you to resources like Techno-Madia that give just a wealth of information So don't think of it as just something that's cursory like a really high-level interview or a really high-level overview of Full-time RVing because they've got resources for everything if you want more information on a particular topic Even if they didn't go into in-depth detail in the book perhaps because the topic is so huge They point you to resources they point you to resources on memberships on mobile internet on RVing with family RVing with kids on the emotional side of RVing on Downsizing the emotional side of that. I mean I just can't say enough good things about it Like I said, even though we've been RVing for four years. I've been dreaded I just sat down and And read So great. We do think that this would make a really good gift You can purchase it on Amazon and it is in bookstores almost everywhere. It's also at some Costco's which is incredible I love to see Merck and Julie posting pictures in Costco. This is like, that's one of my favorite places They're in there. That's so cool So that is those are some of the places that you can get it We will have it linked down below if you'd like to grab it. I love the way it's laid out I think they have a lot of case studies, which I think are really important because It shows different stories and different perspectives from being on the road So it's not just Mark and Julie's voices that are in here They also have really incredible people who are out living this lifestyle. They have families. They have solo RVers They have couples they have all walks of life who are living this lifestyle So I think that's very important and it was very thoughtful to put those different case studies in the book And also visually, it's it's beautiful just to give you a little Snip it and a lot of these people we're friends with we follow on Instagram and follow on YouTube So it is so fun to see this community come together in a book That's all about the RV life speaking of the case studies one thing that I really liked was That they pointed out how full-time RVing isn't just for retirees anymore There's so many people who are entering this lifestyle for various reasons Maybe they just want the freedom of a nomadic lifestyle or they want to pay down dead There are so many different reasons, but there are RVers of every category single people Young people young professionals middle-aged people I mean retirees there's just so many people living this lifestyle now and their book covers it all One chapter or one section was on ways to make money on the road and that's something that applies to everyone How can I fund this lifestyle? There are some people who have a job that allows them to work remotely and so they're able to just back up and go Other people need to be thinking about okay, how do I fund this? So the case studies were great to show you Just a different type of people who are doing it how they're funding their travels and a little bit about why they're doing it There was one particular case study from Tom and Kate Morton or Tom and Caitlin there was one particular case study from Tom and Caitlin Morton from Morton's on the move They're good friends of ours And I love reading their case study because they talked about how they initially set out on a two-year journey and now they said there's Yeah, and now they said there's no end in sight and I love that because when we met them They were talking about the end of their two-year journey and what they were going to do after that And then as we were talking they were saying well, we're leaning more and more towards just making this indefinite And now they're saying there's no end in sight So the case studies were just so great to show you how people are feeling Why they feel that way and why they chose to live the lifestyle they do and how they fund it So four years ago, we spent a lot of time looking through blogs and watching a lot of YouTube videos But I think if we would have come across this guide it would have saved us a lot of time and energy So we'll have it linked down below for you to check it out. It is a really great resource It's beautifully done. It's beautifully written and we 10 out of 10 do recommend that you add it to your Amazon cart if you haven't already and if you are looking for a gift for somebody We think this would be an excellent one for this holiday season So thank you guys for watching if you have any questions, please leave them in the comments down below We would love to hear from you guys if you do find their book in store Definitely take a picture and tag them in it. They love seeing that and until next time We will see you down the road


Again, shopping my stash and showing you things that you have never seen on my channel before, but I keep them because they're good and I'm going to show it to you right now. Hi friends, a while back I did a video where I showed you makeup that I never show on my channel and I was questioning myself, why do I never show this makeup on my channel? Well, a couple of things. Sometimes it is really expensive makeup that I feel like I'm trying to dupe for you guys because it's that good. Sometimes it's makeup like Charlotte Tilbury that I keep for dupable purposes, not because necessarily that I love it, but because I know that people love Charlotte Tilbury and that they are wanting dupes for them. And then I also have things that I just absolutely adore and yes, most of them are high end, but keep in mind that I am looking for dupes all the time. So if you have a dupe that you know of or that you have heard of, will you let me know and then I'll test it and I'll bring it to everybody. That would be great. The first one is one that came out last year and everybody was talking about it and I thought, you know what? I need to have that. I've got to see what the hype is all about and let me get my spectacles on. It is the Dior Backstage Glow Face Palette. This one I think was a limited edition. It's the Rose Gold. This is a nice palette. I like it, but I do feel like it is very overhyped. A couple of the colors are fantastic. They don't have any extra sparkle or anything in them, but there are a couple of colors that do have some extra little fine glitter in them, but it is a beautiful palette. I did like the colors. You're not going to be able to see those very well. And here's the other thing for this being such a high end palette, this happened. One of the pans came out. I haven't had a chance to glue it back in for a year, but I did hear from a lot of people that that was happening. So I feel like, come on, you know, why are we doing that? If it's so high end, let's find some glue that'll work and keep that in the palette. But they are pretty and they are very pretty on your cheeks. I will either swirl them all together or I'll just go across the two this way that don't have any reflex in them or the little specks of glitter in them. It's very micro fine. So if you're completely against glitter, you might not really like any of the backstage palettes that are the glow. But if you don't mind just those teeny tiny little flecks, then I think you'll like this and the formula is really good too. Another one that I've had forever that I keep trying and trying and trying to find a dupe for is from Mac. And this is one of their highlighters as well. I love these highlighters. This is the Double Gleam Extra Dimension Skin Finish. Oh, the color is Double Gleam. So it's the highlighter that's the Extra Dimension Skin Finish. And this one is absolutely beautiful. I do feel like there are a couple of dupes out there. But the formula is not only is it super high beam, as you can see right there, but it's kind of just super duper light. You don't need very much. If you're going to put it on top of your makeup, you don't need very much at all. Look at, wow, it's so high beam. I love it for that. But at the same time, it can get away from you if you're not careful. So this is a beautiful formula. And yes, I am always trying to dupe that. Another Mac product that I absolutely adore. And remember, if this is called Dazzle Gloss or not, I will probably have to throw that up on the screen for you. But this is an Oyster Girl. This is got all kinds of reflex of different colors in it. And it's just a beautiful topper for just about any lip look you have, especially if you want there to be extra dimension. And oh, my goodness, I love this stuff. I wear it all the time. And I have been looking and looking and looking for a dupe for this. Haven't found one yet because not only is it this sheer, pink, pinky peach color, but the formula of it is so nice. It's heavy enough that it sticks around, but it's light enough that it doesn't feel sticky. And yeah, I really, really love that. Another product that I really love that I've never shown are these shadow sticks from Mali. Sometimes you can get them in a bunch, which is what I think I did this time. And then sometimes you can get them in kits where they're single along with other things. They're wonderful about how long they last, and they're so pigmented and pretty. I've been wearing them for a long time, but I forgot how nice they are and just kind of stuck them in the back of the drawer because there's always so much to, you know, explore and review for you guys that's coming out new. But these are really, they're really nice. They really are budge-proof once you get them on. And the colors are so good. She gave you a lot of cool colors in here, which I think are great. And once this sets down, you have about, I don't know, about a minute to work with them. But once they set down, they set down so nicely and they are there all day long. You know, as a bundle, they may seem expensive, but you break them down and they're almost drugstore prices. But the colors, they're so rich, but they're muted enough that they work so good on your eyes. They remind me of a very inexpensive version of Laura Mercier, not a cheap version because they perform just like that. But the Laura Mercier Caviar Sticks, these are every bit as good. And I think that if you've been wanting something like this, they're really great and they're so pretty when you blend them out and easy to blend out to because they're super creamy. Also, the Lippy Liners from ColourPop, I think are so good. They just are so buttery and so creamy. And you can fill in your lips and use them as a lipstick, a matte lipstick, or you can use them as your lip liner. This one is called Cool BFF and I have it swatched right here. It is not cool by any means. I consider it kind of a neutral, almost leaning towards warm. But as as fall comes around, I do like sometimes to have that medium kind of nude look on my lips. And that is what this is. Lip liners are super inexpensive and they are just really good. So give those a try if you've been thinking about them.  This is a really beautiful powder and it's very light and it's very airy. And it is one that won't put a lot down on your skin.  Be strategic about it. Maybe use it, you know, on your high points of your face because it does have that illumination property and it's quite bright. It's not like glowing or beaming. It's just kind of it's like a medium. So it's like a satin. They wouldn't want it to be all over because it's going to make you look too shiny, too disco volley. But it is a beautiful formula and strategically placed. It can be absolutely a beautiful glow. When I say that, I'm talking about, you know, maybe just on, you know, the middle of the forehead there, down the nose. And again, you can use it on your cheeks, of course. But it's a pretty powder that I break out when I want to look extra glowy, extra finished without it looking like I've got grease everywhere. It's really a pretty powder. But again, like I said, I make sure that I'm very strategic with where I put that. Another product that I got from Target, this is from Arches and Halos. It is a brow product and it says it's a professional brow microfiber tinted brow mousse. I believe this one is in taupe. Let me look here. Yes, it is. No, it's not. It's neutral brown. I love how tiny this little wand is. I love that it has fibers in it. Sorry about whatever's on my hand there. I also like that it really catches all of my little hair that I do have. On this side, it's very sparse, but it does catch it and it makes it look a little bit more voluminous. As far as holding, this isn't the greatest for holding your brows in place. But boy, if you have brows that are a little bit sparse, but you do have some natural brows there, this is really going to build it up and they're going to look really pretty and fluffy. And then this is a product that I'm not sold on. This is the Charlotte Tilbury. This is her bronze and glow film star bronze and glow palette. I like this. But again, this is only here because I want to dupe it. And the difference in this and other products that are bronzers and this glow is that it's really subtle. It's very, very subtle. The bronzer is light and that's nice about it, but it is a little bit more along the lines of very warm. So be aware of that. And then the highlight really isn't a highlight. I would say that it's just more of a brightening powder. So I think I like the brightening powder better than I like the actual bronzer in here. So I use this occasionally, very occasionally, because it's just not my favorite thing. And I wanted to bring it to you and show you guys because I have been throwing in a little bit of Charlotte Tilbury here and there for you guys to see, because I just personally don't buy into all of the hype about Charlotte Tilbury, even though I think that she does have a lot of great products. I still think there are a lot of great products that are very, very affordable out there. And this is one of those that I keep trying to dupe and I will find a dupe eventually really close with the essence duo contour. But yeah, this is one that I wanted to show you that I wasn't like sold on. The Wanderlust Buxom Primer Infused Blushes. I got this because I wanted to see what all the hype is because it was all over the place and I got mine in the color Ibiza. I think that's how you say it. It probably isn't. Somebody will tell me it's a pretty bright pink color. But these are the most cheek hugging blushes I think I've ever used. They have that primer in them, so they stay on all day. And you can tell that that is super saturated. But you don't have to use that much. You can really share it out and, you know, your brush would really share it out. But it they're very, very beautiful blushes.  They don't move around. And I feel like Elf did a pretty good job with their primer infused ones. But they're still not quite this level because the Elf ones, they do wear off faster than these do. So if you've been wondering about these, I can give my, you know, flying Okidoki and you can pick one up if it's something that might be in your budget. They're really good blushes. And I think that's it for today. I do have quite a few more here in this box that I would love to show you. But I think I'm going to save those for another video. I love showing you these because some of them are really, really good products. But I'm always trying to bring you the very best of the drug store or very best of affordable. So they don't always make it onto camera. But I do want to tell you that they are good and they are worth the money. Some of them aren't just like that. Charlotte Tilbury that I did show you. But I want to show you that as well. Hopefully this was a little bit helpful if there were any of those on your radar that you were thinking about getting that you might want to pick up. Let me know in the comments section if there are high end products that you think are absolutely worth it and you would not be without it. I love hearing about those as well. Thanks guys so much for spending a part of your day with me. Please take care of yourselves. I will catch you all in my very next video. And I love you much. Goodbye.


Good news, everybody! We found water on Mars! At least, sort of. It's water, but it's not as you would expect it to be, but it's still water, but it's not. But it's water, but it's not water. Water, yeah. It is. And this is your space pod for October 9th, 2015. An announcement about a major discovery on Mars just so happened to occur during the week that a major movie about Mars came out. And that's quite a PR win for NASA. And of course, this is also a big win for us potentially landing a crew on the surface of Mars. But there are also some things that we have to take into consideration with the type of water that is actually on Mars. So, let's go ahead and take a look at it. NASA has a four-tiered holy grail of Mars exploration, and it goes as follows. 1. Was there ever water on Mars? Absolutely, and we confirmed this with the Mars Exploration Rover's data release in 2005. 2. Is there currently water on Mars? Again, absolutely. We found water ice, including a direct find by NASA's Phoenix Lander in 2008. 3. Is there currently liquid water on Mars? As of last week, yes, we now know there is. There's been many hypotheses that it would be found in underground reservoirs, but we have now confirmed that liquid water, I'll bet a special kind, can be found consistently at the surface. 4. Is there life on Mars? This is something that we currently don't know. But all the things you need for life are present on ancient Mars, although that is for another space pod. On September 28, 2015, NASA announced that they found liquid water on the surface of Mars. Sort of. What they actually found were what are called hydrated salts. Now these are salts, more specifically salt molecules that have bonded with water molecules, and that water comes from a source, say like water vapor in the atmosphere, or water rising up from an underground source. These salts, specifically perchlorates, a salt widely found on Mars consisting of one chlorine atom and four oxygen atoms, CLO4, allow water to remain in its liquid state at much colder temperatures than here on Earth. And I mean, we're talking all the way down to minus 70 degrees Celsius, where here on Earth, zero degrees Celsius is the freezing point of water. But this isn't like the water you would expect to find here on Earth, you know, rushing around gullies and carving out canyons. You see, these are small plumes, streaks of water that are going across the surface. They're called recurring slope lineae. They're found mostly in the equatorial regions of Mars and begin developing during the Martian spring, and grow in size until the Martian autumn, when the surface would be at its warmest. How do we know it's water though? Well, modeling the recurring slope lineae has only been successful exclusively with water, and the season variations running from spring through autumn again would only exclusively occur with water. These recurring slope lineae have been seen since 2011, and there's been three seasonal cycles to gather enough data to conclusively say that they are generated by liquid water on the surface of Mars. They also occur at temperatures at around minus 23 degrees Celsius at the lowest, and zero degrees Celsius at the highest. And these temperatures are much too high for carbon dioxide ice. So the only possible culprit for this is water. One thing that we're unsure of is where this water actually comes from. You see, we found these recurring slope lineae occurring on sand dunes, a place that it would be impossible for water to come up from the underground to the surface. It does generate some hesitancy in the planetary protection crowd, as we now have a source of water that we could contaminate, even with our current level of protocol as to sterilizing spacecraft. It adds a level of complication to the hunt for life on Mars. However, this is really good for the potential prospects of a crude mission along that timeline of some time in the next 30 years. You see, there's actually lots you can do with hydrated perchlorates. For one, you can remove the perchlorates and just have water, which you can drink. And you can also use that to make fuel for your rockets if they use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. You can also make methane by pulling out the hydrogen from your hydrates and carbon from the carbon dioxide of Mars' atmosphere. Or if you prefer, you can separate the perchlorates and make solid rocket fuel, such as ammonium perchlorate, which powered the shuttle's twin solid rocket boosters. You can also take that chlorine and develop special sterilization compounds, which could come in handy for making sure humans don't accidentally expose any kind of organisms from the Earth to the Martian environment. Perchlorates can also be used medically, say if due to radiation exposure from the long flight and asteroids thyroid may start running out of control, perchlorates, with the proper medical usage, can inhibit the problems this could cause. Also, we can use that oxygen to generate a breathable atmosphere inside of our habitat, along with a multitude of other potential benefits. Become a Patron and sign up to help us make these amazing things that tell you all about the universe. So, until next week, keep exploring!


Good day. Now, my paper is the titled double-edged sword heterogeneity within the informal sector. Now, despite a high unemployment rate and widespread poverty, South Africa's informal sector is relatively small compared to other African countries. And this is usually attributed to either high reservation wage or capital constraints providing barriers to entry into the informal sector. Now, this paper plans to explore the incentives that motivate the entry into or the exit from the informal sector. And okay, it's ongoing work. So so far what appears to be happening is that these incentives differ depending on whether the person was an active job seeker or an inactive job seeker. I used the labor force survey that which is a rotating panel data set collected by statistics South Africa and in the period September 2001 to March 2004, we were able to extract the panel component of the data set. Now, according to statistics South Africa, a person is defied as being in an informal sector if they are classified, if they are in an enterprise, which is not registered and also is has a size of less than five workers. Now, this is a rather, you know, broad definition. So I looked at the occupations that the people find themselves in. Note also that I restricted my sample to black females because I didn't want to get into problems of race or gender when interpreting the results. Okay, so most of the people about a little less than 92% are in elementary occupations. They are service workers and you know craft and related trade workers. Now, these are the small scale retail enterprises which don't earn a lot of money for the people. Now, to give an idea of the well-being of people who are in the informal sector versus people who are in broad unemployment, I constructed kernel densities of log of household expenditure and here you can see, okay, the dotted line is the people who are in the broad unemployment category and the solid line is people who are in the informal sector and just to look at this, we see that the people who are in the informal sector seem to have a lower household expenditure and if we look at how much they actually earn within the informal sector, now I have decomposed it into active and inactive work seekers. You see that they earn, you know, roughly the same amount of money. Now, in order to look at, you know, the rough transition matrices of how people move between sectors, well, between labour market outcomes, I see that active work seekers, okay, by the way, the people in the columns, the columns represent time t plus 1 and the rows represent time t, so you look at it this way. So the active work seekers are more likely to be formally employed than informally employed, whereas the inactive work seekers are more likely to go into the informal sector rather than the informal sector and if we look at the exit rates from the informal sector, these are quite high. I mean, the entry is only around 7% and here we have 16% to 15% who are exiting into the various forms of unemployment. Okay, so then I wanted to construct a theoretical model to see, you know, how this and everything is motivated and what I did was take the classical job search theory model and had an explicit informal sector there, so now what is usually had in the classical job search theory is just formal sector. Now I had an explicit informal sector and a formal sector and from that I could find a latent variable that was constructed by showing, you know, the difference between the income opportunities and the person's reservation wage, given their physical capital, their human capital and how much value they get from their home production. From, okay, this will help you. I think this will help you more for discussions to the end. Peters represents income opportunities and the fares represents the reservation wage effect. So now in this data set that I had, I didn't have a variable that explicitly said what physical capital was. So I used a multiple indicator instrumental variable approach to sort of solve this omitted variable bias. I used, as an indicator, I used the long households for capital expenditure and as an IV, I used the state given old age pension grant and to remove a further source of endogeneity, which would be from an observable effect, I just used fixed-effect estimation. Okay, now I want to, due to time constraints, I want to just concentrate on the two main columns here because this is where the story really lies for me. It seems as if the active seekers are pulled into the informal sector because here, if we look at the long household expenditure, and remember the long household expenditure, we're using to see what's happening with the physical capital. A person gains way more in terms of, you know, wages, which would be the income effect than, you know, they would raise their reservation wage if they were to get an increase in the household expenditure or the capital. Whereas the people who are inactive are actually pushed into the informal sector. This means that if you lower the household expenditure, the person, you know, has to, the reservation wage effect, if you heighten, sorry, if you increase the long household expenditure, the reservation wage increases way more than what they would have had an increase in terms of income opportunities they would have had with the same kind of capital. So you'd have to actually decrease the long household expenditure in order to push them into the informal sector. Now, okay, again, this is a bit of ongoing work, and I am a bit worried about what the long of household expenditure variable is saying because we know from literature, especially from Kingdom and Knight, that the people, the active work seekers and inactive work seekers are the same. In fact, Kingdom and Knight also say that the inactive work seekers are actually discouraged work seekers. So the results, having differing results is actually a bit, you know, controversial. So what I know the problem is in terms of the household expenditure variable in the instatistic South Africa is that it was underreported. And so, okay, to try to counter that, I tried to use some interval regression using the household income, extracting what the person's actual earnings were from that regression in order to see what, you know, a bit of a higher estimate. But it's still giving me very bad results. So I'd like to get some feedback into which is the most honest way to construct a household expenditure variable that would reflect what is happening in terms of capital for the individuals.


Exposure therapy and anxiety and anxiety recovery, here's one thing I want you to know about that today. If you decide to do an exposure or otherwise surrender to anxiety or experiment with willful tolerance or letting go of your resistance, initially your anxiety level will probably rise in those first few moments. That's expected. It doesn't mean that something is wrong or that you are failing at the exposure in any way. Remember that your goal with exposure is to trigger those feelings because the feelings are the exposure. And here's the other thing you need to know. If you can hang in there and tolerate those feelings for just two minutes more than you did the day before, you are winning. You just prove that you are capable. You do not have to do this all at one time. It is perfectly acceptable to incrementally increase the time that you are willing to tolerate and surrender to and float through those anxious feelings. So if your anxiety initially rises, that's okay. Just try to hang in there a little longer today than you did yesterday and then take the win.


This session we are happy to introduce a wonderful session called Bringing Literature to Life in Open Simulator. Our speakers today are Mary Howard and Andrew Wheelock. Mary Howard is a sixth grade teacher at Grand Island's Veronica Connor Middle School. She is a recent finalist for the New York State Teacher of the Year in 2017. She has also won the New York SCATE Educator of the Year award. Her blog, Your Smart Articles, showcases her amazing ideas and collaborative spirit. Andrew Wheelock is a 20-year educator with a degree in elementary education. He is now a technology integrator who works with schools around the western New York area and is the project director of the Islands of Enlightenment. This is a self-hosted open sim virtual world that offers schools the opportunity to create and explore history, architecture, and language arts through virtual simulations. Welcome all. Let's begin the session and Andrew will begin with you. Hi everyone, thank you so much for joining us. It's always an honor to be at this conference because you see so many just great like-minded educators who are doing similar things. So I'm going to just introduce myself and then I'm going to introduce Mary who's really kind of the the mover and shaker of this whole project that we're going to talk about today and really let her dig deep into it. Just so you know, we started the what we call the Islands of Enlightenment project for grades 6 through 12 in western New York. And so we hosted ourselves and we have the various schools around western New York available to do the projects that we've created. So over the past three years, I've talked about many of these projects so I won't go too far into them but we did the understanding the Holocaust project which was kind of a recreation of the streets of Amsterdam where of course the secret annex in Anne Frank's diary was done. And then I brought Mary on board really for the Air of the King project and she was a really big help with sixth grade medieval history curriculum and we created kind of a quest-based learning adventure where kids travel through a medieval village and kind of quest up and participate in a kind of medieval King Arthur type adventure. So that was our second year and then the third year again I worked with Mary and we did kind of an architecture by design workshop where we toured the Frank Lloyd Wright Starwood Martin House and then had kids create their own builds. And in the meantime, Mary has really taken off with it and really started developing her own projects and lessons with her sixth grade students which has been really the ultimate goal for me was to try and get teachers to really take off and embrace the technology themselves and go with it. And so with that I'm going to turn it over to Mary and I'll have her kind of talk about some of the ways she took what I started and and just grew and it's amazing stuff. So Mary, take it away. Thank you. Sure thing. As Spiff mentioned, I'm a sixth grade teacher and have had just the due to Spiff's brilliance. Now he's so humble giving me credit but truly it was Spiff's vision and brilliance that allowed all of these projects to take place and he came to me saying, you know, what can we do here? And I've got this thing that you might be interested in. It's it's called open sim and I was like, huh? And had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into but certainly have no regrets at this point because as Spiff described, we've been on some pretty amazing adventures together with the students and I teach sixth grade social studies as well as English language arts. And the majority of our projects as we got started, we felt like themselves really well to social studies. So we were able to do middle ages projects in this quest based Air of the King project. It was pretty amazing and along the way my students became builders and I learned a little bit about building but I also learned a lot about how and how you can implement open sim with 11 year old children and how to overcome the different hurdles. And so as the years progressed, we decided Spiff and I decided to be really wonderful if we could integrate some literature into what we were doing with open sims. So I called him up one day and I said, I need a mansion and within a couple of days he had given me a mansion and so hopefully up on the screen here in a moment we'll take a look at this this mansion. I mean wouldn't that be awesome if we could just ask anybody, hey I need a mansion and sure enough they turn around and give you a mansion. But luckily Spiff has that power. So my students and I were reading a novel and the title of that novel was The Westing Game as hopefully you can see up here on the slide and I asked for this mansion because the mansion is sort of the key component in the story that we were reading by Ellen Raskin called The Westing Game. And I wanted the students to be able to use the open sim in like I said a literature fashion in some way. So what I came up with was kind of a scavenger hunt. Everybody knows students love scavenger hunts and so I wanted to be able to use the open sim and a scavenger hunt and this mansion and the Westing Game and the chicken dance. So I actually reached out to Helena Caena if you know her on Second Life, reached out to a friend of mine and asked her to do a little scripting for me and these three components came together in something that I'm going to share with you, a pretty marvelous experience that the students had. So moving on to the next slide here I'm going to take you through pretty much what the students were able to do. So you can see here this is the mansion and before the students came into the open sim we did a little okay we did a lot of front loading. We had to set up this scavenger hunt and we had to decorate this mansion for Halloween because the setting in our story is October, actually October 31st is where the story begins. So we had to get our mansion looking a little bit Halloween-ish and you can see here it's looking sort of dark. Let's move on to the next side here so we can talk about really the experience that the students had. So what I asked the students to do and what I embedded throughout the floors of the mansion was they had to search for these Westing dollars and if you can see closely on the slide on the left hand side there's a Westing dollar and those dollars are hidden throughout the mansion. So it got this group of about 20 students into the mansion exploring and looking around for these dollars and when they clicked on the dollar it would reveal some sort of question and it was definitely a content-based question. They had to answer something about the novel to demonstrate their understanding of what they're reading. So to start off they had to indicate who the friendly doorman was that greets them in the front of Westing mansion. So they click on the dollar they receive a clue and they also received a chat channel so that they couldn't really see what each other was responding with. I wanted to keep everything on a hidden channel because you know the students would glom on to each other and just get responses and answers from each other so they had to remember for its last 76 and to enter their answers onto this this channel that was built into it. So then on the next slide once they've answered a question what happens after that is if they do it correctly if they answer it correctly and it was kind of a neat experience again as an ELA teacher. I spend a lot of time reminding students to a spell things correctly and b that names are proper nouns and they begin with capital letters and that is important. I really like the fact that they get nothing and they get nowhere unless they do it right. I really appreciate that fact about open sim so unless they're typing the person's name and spelling it correctly and capitalizing those letters they can't get any answers so in this case they type in that answer and up pops a teleport so they had it right they get a teleport so they're demonstrating the knowledge of the content and at the same time they're getting excited because oh I got it right and there's that instant and immediate feedback that they get they know they got it right because there's a pop up and so they teleport somewhere awesome and so that is the next step so moving on to the next slide it sort of shows where they headed next and for me this was the absolute most wonderful part of this because it's what I call a fidgetle it's this combination of using a virtual environment but actually taking something physical and incorporating that so what you can see here on the screen is when they teleported it teleported them to a hidden location and I kind of staggered these hidden locations all around the island where this mansion is and if you can see up on the screen that's what I call a red lens reveal so I was able to take yellow text red text pink text kind of blend it all together and cover up blue text underneath that image that you're seeing on the screen was just actually created on a google slide and when I inserted that image it allowed the students to take a piece of red cellophane I actually got them like kind of cool looking um lenses that made them look like um I don't know investigators and they would hold that lens right up to the computer screen over the image they were looking at and it would reveal the blue text behind the pink red and yellow text and that blue text that shows up is actually a riddle question and it is a pretty amazing kind of old-fashioned piece of technology physical technology integrated with digital technology to create kind of a fidgetle experience and they love it I have a whole bunch of really cute pictures of the students holding those little red lens up to the screen so that they can read their secret message that they have on the on the little posters that they teleported to so this particular one that you're looking at you can't see the entire thing but it just tells it shows the words it's the last few words of the riddle to the far orient and then on the right hand side of the slide over here was a companion sheet that they had that went along with their scavenger hunt so they had to record each line of the riddle and then they had to go step by step station through station to all those western dollars answering the question based on the novel teleporting to their secret reveal experience receiving the riddle question writing it down and then going back again so they kept going back and forth back and forth and it is just so exciting to see how crazy excited the kids get about doing this so much better than you know just a skill and drill review or let's review the characters in the novel and you know who's this person or who's that person it's a really amazing way to use open sim and keep the kids engaged now if you're curious yeah go ahead sorry to interrupt I just wanted to say I came in and watched the kids do this activity and it was just amazing like just to see the enthusiasm and engagement and excitement so I just want to throw that out there yeah and we actually had a news crew on the day that Andrew came out and we were featured on a local um educational tv show any chance you could go back to that last slide where we were just yeah and one more thing if you're curious how I did that and how I created those images um there is a google a shortened url on the left hand side that you can access go.gl forward flash and let's see if I can toss it in the chat here um if you can't quite see it it's a link to a google slide um using the same method so if you're just kind of curious and you want to try that out there's a free slide that you can that you can use okay you can switch and so after they have this experience and they've collected all of the riddle lines they've eliminated every single character in the novel and this particular novel has over 16 characters and it's really a lot of knowledge that they have to have you know based on this novel it is no easy novel to teach again to 10 and 11 year old and so there's quite a heavy bit of content and memorization that goes along with the characters and how those characters contribute to the plot so once they're done with this riddle they have um they have a they have to solve what the the big riddle is they've collected all these lines and they have to come up with this answer and so once they find the answer at least they think they know what the answer is which by the way is the word compass they have to teleport to the roof of the westing mansion and again here's where the scripting came in my good friend was able to script me a chicken dance and they type in the word compass to the secret you know little compartment on the secret channel and sure enough it animates their avatar and they do the chicken dance and you know they're thrilled and they're excited and I know yes the chicken dance but we're talking 10 year olds and that is a really exciting thing to you know animate their avatar um they at this point when we're when we're doing these they don't have a vast uh level of knowledge when it comes to open sim we you know we've dabbled a little bit we've learned a little bit about putting our clothes on we're learning a little bit about you know building and maybe scripting if we're lucky but animating the avatar really isn't something they've seen yet so when they realize that they could just you know get up there and chicken dance it really is a highly motivating thing so you know the the chicken dance is the the end of the scavenger hunt it demonstrates that you know they've been successful and meanwhile the results in terms of you know their studying experience and preparing for the test they really speak for themselves they all did and this has been my third year doing it but they all do incredible on the test you know yet they're engaged and they're learning and I think it's just a really good example of how powerful the open sim can be for student learning especially when it comes to literature spiff I don't know if you want to interject anything here um just I like I said from the beginning it was just nice to see a teacher take off with that I think you know there's a huge learning curve in this technology so finding teachers that are willing to be fearless to take that on as a challenge that's really challenge number one so I just loved the way Mary embraced it and took it on and we had our we had our bumps and bruises along the way but we you know we're we persevered and it was to me for the benefit of the kids that it all came together and I think they really look forward to all of the the work that they do so that's great well I see lots of wonderful comments very excited especially about the chicken dance um but and I don't see any questions yet but I have one for you Mary and that is I am so curious how do the kids handle it when they don't get the teleport or the prize because well they thought they could not have to spell correctly or use correct grammar or whatever it is that they have to do that so many of educators say how can I get them to use proper grammar and proper spelling and they're just not paying any attention it's well they handle it like uh like most of the time when they can't do their login it won't let me it won't let me you know and me I kind of get this smug little smile and shrug my shoulders and it's it's sort of that ultimate I told you so moment because I like to see I like to see them build resilience and I do this sounds kind of mean but you know failing uh is okay and and having a minute you know a minor failure like that is a powerful learning experience for them and it builds resilience and then they'll figure it out and it is definitely a lesson that will stick with them they realize you know I gotta do it that's not gonna work otherwise and that you know they tend to get a little desperate because they see the person next to them is getting ahead of them or is is being successful and they want to be like that person and you sense this um you know ramping up of desperation until they they realize what it is that they've done wrong okay great yes uh that way they won't point to you and say my teacher is so mean she makes me spell correctly yes definitely like when the computer is the bad guy and not me exactly exactly all right okay well that was a wonderful presentation thank you so much Mary and Andrew uh as a reminder to our audience you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference dot open simulator dot org following this session the next session will begin at 11 o'clock a.m in the os cc expo zone two region this is the hypergrid safari and it is not to be missed if you want a fun guided way of learning to hypergrid it's organized by therza ember and again it starts in looks like just a few moments uh if you aren't familiar with jumping from one open simulator to another grid this is the way to learn how to do it it's absolutely wonderful and amazing and the places that you actually get to are are amazing as well also during this next two hour break we encourage you to visit the oscc 17 poster expo in the oscc expo three region to find accompanying information on presentations along with sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the oscc expo regions we will be restarting the keynote regions today at 12 p.m noon pacific so please make sure to visit other regions at that time oscc 17 sessions will begin again in the keynote regions at 1 p.m for the open simulator e-commerce panel as a reminder you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference dot open simulator dot org thank you again to our speakers and to all of you in the audience and have fun hyper safari gridding


Felly yw'n cael ei sgol eich cyfosigau'r newid ynghyd i ddangos yma? Wnaethwn i daisiau facebooku yw Llyfrgeodones ar y cwrwp gyfrifolwyd. Efallai y clygau yma gafor sydd wedi gweithio'i cyfrifolwyd o'r Cymru. Yn gyfarwyddol, efallai yw'r Gafor cyfrifolwyd ar y Cymru a'i USいうこと. Llyfrgeodones, yw'r cyfrifolwyd eich cyfrifolwyd? Cymru yn y cyfrifolwyd eich cyfrifolwyd, sydd hynny i gael eu brif Fastanol moyn yn cyflawni dylai'r wych, a bydd ffroffit yn yw'r ysgol, a'u cyd-a-fyrdd o'r enw i'r newid. Felly, mae'n ddim yn dwylo'r bwysig yw ddweud o'r pryd yn llyfrwyr yn eich cyfr seals. Mae'n ddaeth unrhyw yw, ond mae'n gweithio'n cael ei wneud i'r klu'r cyflwyno. ac y lleolwyr yn ymgueddir ynglyniad y Llywodraeth Unedol. So, mae'n meddwl am ddod, sy'n meddwl i'r cynllun ar gyfer y lleolwyr i'r gwael? Mae'r meddwl, nid oedd, mae'r meddwl i'n meddwl i dda'r hynny'n mynd i'r gweld yn gwelio i gael y llunydd. A'n meddwl i'n meddwl i ddim yw'r meddwl i'r gweld ar y cyfeirio gyda'r cynnwys cyflosiaid yn ymgyrchol oedd ymgyrchol oedd ymgyrchol ..a chaeligfyrdau yn ymgyrchol, ac yn eu cyflwyddol o'r cyflwydau yn y gymryd. Mae'n ddweud, a mae'n ddweud a'n ddweud, ond mae'n ddweud, ac mae'n ddweud, ac mae'n ddweud o'r proses. Mae'r cyflwydau yn ymgyrchol yw brexit, ydw i'w bwysig yn cyfnodol o'r cyflwydd, ac mae'n wirthio... You're already working on the unions within the United Kingdom, wouldn't you? Yeah, this came about because I was between 2014 and 2016. I was special economic adviser to the Committee for Enterprise, Trade and Investment of Northern Island Assembly. And I was asked to write a briefing note on Brexit by one of the members of the Legislative Assembly. And that briefing… Well, that was quite smart of him, wasn't it? …wyd it was, but they hadn't even thought about it. And it went to the Deputy First Minister and it went to the Taoiseach, so it had some influence. But I could argue it's become the bane of my academic career because it's taken over and now there's so many public events. I'm one in Milton Keynes with a former Cabinet Minister. Right. So you're talking about Brexit partly from Northern Ireland, but also Scotland and Wales? Yes. Yes, because it flows from the special case I would argue about Northern Ireland and its relationship with Ireland then to the other devolved nations, particularly economically and particularly in the light of the first Scottish referendum on independence. Whether we have a second one is an open question. And what about the knock-on effect of the general election as well? That's been interesting because Brexit was the elephant in the room. But the election issues seem to focus on the impact of austerity. My own view is Brexit came about because of the impact of the global financial crisis on all regions outside London and the South East. Actually had less national income per head now than they did in 2008. And my own view is that Europe was the wrong target. Europe was blamed for the ills that came about as a result of austerity policies and the decline of a number of regions. So that's, for our catchphrase, if you like, a hashtag of Just Society and the overall idea of citizenship and governance. This is very, very important. You're saying that underlying the Brexit referendum and the general election result is really about a sense of unfairness. People have grievances. You think it really economic? Well, it's socioeconomic. All governments have had not activist regional policies. So privileging London and the South East business and financial services is all very well. But actually that causes spatial imbalance. It also causes socioeconomic imbalance. So the people who've got left behind, if you like, by those changes in the economy are located out in the poorer parts of the UK. So in terms of Just Society, any reasonable society would do something about re-establishing that balance. So it was the first, and so far only in recent years, Scottish referendum on independence. Was that about a kind of anger? I think Scotland's complex in the sense that for a long time the Labour Party saw it as a personal fiefdom to be unchallenged. And I think since the election, first election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, the idea of an active union, partners within a union, has actually been undermined. And so there's been a powerful sense of resentment, if you like, against England as a result of that. And also the wider European Union setting, where a lot of Scots see themselves as more European than they do British, for example. So I think those things culture a sense of constitutional injustice, and parts of Scotland, again, getting left behind, has been the basis of a lot of those grievances. And in Northern Ireland, did you anticipate the, sorry to keep asking whether you anticipated things, but is it interesting as to whether social scientists, economists, political scientists can predict almost what's going to happen? Would you have seen the DUP Conservative support coming tonight, or was that a surprise? No, it wasn't surprised because of the nature of the DUP itself. Which is what? Well, it's a combination of, based in rural Ireland, and also the poorer parts of Belfast, and the free Presbyterian Church. So it's a political arm of the free Presbyterian Church. They're obviously criticised heavily for their social conservatism, but I've always found the members of the Legislative Assembly, I dealt with in the DUP, complex and interesting, in that they were very rooted in their communities, and looking to maintain the social welfare, if you like, of those communities. But I think desperate needs caused for desperate measures are also a hung parliament. The traditional link is obviously the Ulster Union. Can I ask, a thing which surprised me is people saying in Northern Ireland that it's somehow unfair and unwise to have the government linked to the DUP, because that impinges on the honest broker a rigorous impartiality role. But on the other hand, Sinn Fein is actually seeking power in Dublin, and so it could have become part of a coalition in the Republic of Ireland, couldn't it? It could indeed. And then it'd be the other way around, wouldn't it? Yeah, I mean political parties try to look after their own, and it is politics, and given the unfortunate interregnum way the Assembly is not meeting at the moment, you're going to position yourself in that way. It just seems to me, though, that this opens up the possibility, the breakup of the union, following Tom Lenn's 1977 book when he warned against the dangers of devolution, in that the deal between the DUP and the Tories makes a special case for Northern Ireland. But a lot of the constituency, the DUP, relies in agriculture, relies on co-operation with the South, so there has to be a special deal almost for a whole of Ireland. And then you could argue, well, why not a special case for Scotland and then Wales? And this is part of a bigger issue, I suppose, which goes back to Brexit, which has gained very confusing. If our terminology is, are you a unionist or a nationalist? It becomes quite difficult to work out why are the nationalists in Scotland in favour of the union with Europe, but not with the UK? And are unionists in Northern Ireland in favour of a union that's European? No. What's really going on with the united bit of the United Kingdom? Is it a federalist kingdom? Is that the future? Or no kingdom? My preference is for a federalist system, because federalist systems have greater economic growth, have greater equality. That's like the United States? Or Germany, or Canada, and even Spain when it was the post-the-girl of success the EU before the crisis. And what are the features then of a federal state that work? The two principles are solidarity and subsidiarity, which is what the European Union is meant to be. In that, you have to have a strong centre, so things like defence, law and order, but you devolve powers and financing to the appropriate level of government. And you have what's called fiscal federalism, where you share resources, pre-poor and richer. Final question for me, the open university has come up to its 50th anniversary. By the time of our 100th anniversary, will there be a United Kingdom with Scotland, Wales, England, Northern Ireland in the same state? I'm not a betting man, but I think there won't be a United Kingdom in the same way. But you could have a looser federal association. And that's always been the history of these things going. And if you only have to now look at the Balkans. Dr Lesley Budd, thank you very much. Thank you.


Good afternoon everyone, so I am the policy director from the Office of the Independent Monitor in Denver, Colorado I'm going to present some work that my co-author Dr. Matt Beutis and I did back in 2014 and talk about this sort of ramifications of that work and some of the challenges that we faced in looking at the implementation of a body-worn camera project and and This project focuses largely on policy and so I think You'll see some really common themes in the work that we did and the work that Maria is talking about which I think should lead to a nice conversation So the Office of the Independent Monitor we have five main responsibilities We connect outreach to communities and law enforcement We make recommendations for improving policy practices and training and that's largely what today's presentation is about We monitor officer-involved shootings and in custody death investigations We monitor and make recommendations on on internal affairs Investigations and disciplinary findings and then we have a mediation program in which we try to cultivate community member and officer dialogue When there's been a conflict or a complaint So in 2014 the Denver police department piloted a body-worn camera project So I'll give you a little bit of the chronology and some of the details because they're useful for background So we have six patrol districts in Denver seven if you count the airport This project focused on district six, which is the district that patrols downtown Denver So sort of the tourist area as well as the area where the restaurants and bars and clubs are And so a little bit different from the rest of Denver when you're looking at a program like this And so the body-worn camera pilot project went on for about six months the roughly the last six months of 2014 The patrol officers were outfitted with cameras the supervisors weren't so if you're a sergeant a lieutenant and obviously command staff They were not assigned to wear body-worn cameras during the pilot project the project was was The pilot period had a what was called a testing and evaluation policy It's a long document, and I won't get into the details But I think the important part of that policy was that officers were required to activate their camera prior to any officer Initiated field contacts and for a broad range of calls for service So really anytime they could where it didn't present a safety issue There was no discipline in place at the time right because this was only one It was a pilot project in one district They couldn't impose discipline on one district and not the others and during that time 80 uses of force were reported In that six month period that roughly six month period And so we were really interested in looking at those 80 uses of force Because I think a primary role of body-worn cameras is is to capture uses of force and provide sort of objective accounts of You know what type of resistance could be seen what the officer's perception was and why the officer chose to respond in the way that he or she did so The the sort of field of research around body-worn cameras is very interesting I think like a lot of technology and policing we've seen this kind of massive This rush to implementation and you know the research has sort of followed suit So we haven't really set up an evidence base at the front and then Tested cameras and made sure that they work and then put them out But I think a lot of people bought into them for really obvious reasons. I think that you know body-worn camera programs I think we all can agree or generally positive programs Most of the research that's currently out there focuses on the quality of officer and citizen interactions and uses of force I cite Cynthia Lum and her colleagues here not because they did that research But because they wrote a really nice piece where they sort of stepped back and looked at the research that's gone on in the past Couple years and said, you know, here's what we know some stuff about here's what we know a lot about And here's where there are big gaps in the knowledge. So I'm drawing pretty heavily from that work on this slide Body-worn cameras, we know they're related to decreases in complaints and uses of force I think from the, you know, kind of seminal research on Rialto, California done by Barack Ariel and his colleagues And some more recent research that's come out of places like Orlando and Arizona We've seen these these sort of decreases that come along with the implementation of a body-worn camera program Some research has found quicker resolution of complaints More proactive policing and less invasive policing. So, you know, more issuing of citations less stop and frisk So positive things like that Improved case processing higher likelihood of charges and convictions So also a good outcome, although I will point out that that that piece of research was focusing primarily on domestic violence cases But it does point to the utility of the body-worn cameras for sort of agencies that work alongside the police as well as the police The big gap here is that there hasn't been much research on implementation and organizational concerns And so I think there's there's a call out right now to really try to fill some of that research and I hope that this research fills that gap even just a little bit so We at the Office of the Independent Monitored, you did a policy analysis At the end of the body-worn camera pilot project We wanted to exist the the assess the existing policy and program design We really had two questions We wanted to know if officers and supervisors were adhering to the policy that was in place during the project Specifically around activation and reporting and things like that And then we wanted to know if any alterations were needed to the policy for the full rollout of the cameras department-wide Which is actually happening this year. They're sort of phasing it out phasing it in one district at a time throughout the city and You know, I kind of point to these goals and questions because I Want to make the point that we weren't you know, we weren't conducting this kind of rigorous academic research with the goal of Establishing whether or not body-worn cameras Contribute to complaints decreases and complaints that you know, we were doing really kind of simple applied research We were coding reports. We were counting and the goal was really just to assess the policy of the department that we oversee So we reviewed supervisor use of force cover sheets for those 80 uses of force involving Officers in District 6 and you know, this is probably a very similar process and many of your jurisdictions Whenever there's a use of force that meets a certain level of criteria or a certain level of resistance The officer has to inform their supervisor and that supervisor are usually the sergeant will come out and conduct an administrative investigation To sort of gather evidence and determine whether or not there may have been any potential Policy violation or any misconduct and so they write a narrative report that you know It could be anywhere from like one page to 15 pages long with their assessment as well as whether they think that there's more Investigation needed or if there were any training issues identified So we use that start usually the sergeants assessment of whether or not the body-worn camera had been turned on and so the Policy had Instructed supervisors that when you're writing these administrative reports you should indicate whether or not there's body-worn camera footage available and then we looked at other relationships between Officers and whether or not they activated body-worn cameras or whether or not they were likely to we didn't find much and so I'll sort of gloss over that second question and really focus on the first question So we have a couple key findings here The first is that body-worn cameras did not record a majority of uses of force in District 6 for various reasons So there were 80 uses of force in that time period The 21 of them had been recorded on a body-worn camera So about 26% of the total and then we sort of looked at the reasons why some of the other Incidents hadn't been recorded and we'll I'll get into the more detailed incidents in the next slide But I think the you know this big kind of I think it's orange up there a piece of the pie 44% of the uses of force were not recorded only because of the the details of the policy which said Supervisors and officers working off-duty are not required to wear body-worn cameras And so huge policy gap that sort of flagged to us that you know that that policy needed to change And I think what we were seeing is that often sergeants, you know theoretically sergeants are not Being supervisors on the street But I think what we saw in reality is that they actually were and they were getting involved in use as a force And then we have a very very large off-duty sort of secondary employment program where the police officers are employed at the the bars and the clubs downtown and Places where uses of force are likely to happen Sports stadiums places like that. So we were concerned about that and then so so let's get rid of those That those 35 that weren't recorded because of the policy And now we'll look at the other 45 where these are ones where we expected to be a recording under the policy That was in place at the time about half of them actually were recorded I'm sorry if it's confusing to kind of jump from the 80 to the 45 But about a quarter of them weren't recorded for reasons that make a lot of sense so if you're an officer New using the equipment and you see a fight break out over here Probably the first thing you're going to do is go break up that fight and not think about pressing the activation button At least at first and we knew they had there had to be some muscle memory development and things like that There were some user and equipment errors So cameras getting stuck under lapels or wires getting knocked off during fights And there is one incident in which the officer There an incident was kind of wrapping up and everything was fine So the officer turned his camera off and then there was a use of force since and then there was small handful that we didn't know We didn't know why or we weren't we didn't know for sure of it had been recorded based on what was included in the The supervisors summary report So we did look sort of descriptively at whether complaints and uses of force went up went down If there was no change now again, we're not this we didn't use regression We didn't you know propensity score matching nothing like that This is just looking at the pilot period in 2014 Compared to the same period of time in 2013. So our pilot site in district six We actually saw complaints went up by 8% uses of force went up by 11% these numbers are kind of small So, you know, we're talking about 10 additional complaints and uses of force if we look at the rest of the department Complaints had gone up a little bit as well But uses of force had actually gone down and we can't really draw any conclusion from this But we thought it was an interesting finding So we issued nine recommendations to the Denver Police Department while they were in the process of finalizing their body-worn cameras So at the end of the pilot project, they took the cameras off the streets They sent them back to taser and they worked on their policy and then they you know They did an RFP process and now they're putting the cameras back on the streets right now So, you know, we thought they should provide additional training on activating the cameras prior to citizen contacts Evaluate potential equipment issues number three is probably our big recommendation here Deploy cameras to all uniformed officers who interact with the public regardless of their rank and regardless of whether or not they're working off-duty Instruct officers to keep the cameras activated until the event actually concludes require citizen notification, I think just building from the Findings of the realtor study. We thought that notification would be pretty important Require better documentation from supervisors to not provide notice of disciplinary penalties Provide more details on privacy issues, which are you know a very hot topic right now And solicit officer and community input for future revision of the policy so this is where I wish we had Maria and her team in there to help out on that side of it and You know the initially the the department so they they did not issue any sort of formal response to any of the recommendations There was no documentation about what they were going to do and about eight months after we put that report out They released a draft public policy for a draft policy for public comment on their website They got some comments from the community. I think sort of outside of that process they drew it it drew a lot of criticism from you know civil rights groups and and advocates and even from our city council for not Incorporating all of our recommendations and I think specifically the recommendation around outfitting supervisors and officers working off duty So subsequently and around the fall of last year the chief decided to To require sergeant, so we didn't get all the supervisors, but we got the sergeants Which I think is important and officers were off working off duty to where a body were in cameras so they're still figuring out the details of how they're going to make that happen and getting the cameras out there and But that that was an exciting change So I've got a couple of discussion points, but I think I maybe I'll just leave them for the actual discussion. Okay Thank You Jennifer