God in country says it all because our country needs God. We need to put God back into our lives and give Him honor and glory. Leonard Jemifortune toured and sang and performed with the legendary Statler Brothers for 21 years. He is the member of the Gospel Hall and the Country Music Hall of Fame and has entertained millions around the world. Today, God continues to take Him down new paths, surviving quintuple bypass surgery and sharing His new albums, God and Country and Brothers of the Heart. This is His story. This is today's Nashville. This is faith. Jamie, it is so good to see you again. Terry, it's good to be here with you again. It's been about, what, four years? It's been four years. You've been busy and what a year you've been through. This year's been a little tough year, but God's been good and faithful, taking me through a lot of things that I never dreamed I'd go through. But He's been faithful and brought me through it every step of the way. So I'm very thankful. Well, let's talk about that first because then I want to go back and where it all started. But let's talk about this year, what happened. Because I know I was following it and praying for you and your family. When I heard the news, I was just, ugh. Well, I had a couple of friends that had heart attacks and strokes. They were actually younger than me. And so all these alarms were going off inside of me. And my wife said one day, I told her about some little issues I was having. She said, we're going to make you a doctor's appointment. And I'm like, okay, if you want to, I don't think there's anything wrong. So I go into this doctor's appointment and I start telling him what's going on. I passed every test but won. And he said, we're going to do a heart catheterization on you. He said, I think you might need a stent or something like that. And I said, okay. So we lined it up. So I go in and do the catheterization. And he puts his screen up in front of me after it's all over with. It shows me my heart, which is have five blockages and one was 99%. The others were 95% blocked. And he said, I don't know how you're walking around. You hadn't had a massive heart attack yet. He said, we're going to do emergency surgery. We're going to take you right to the hospital, down to Centennial and do surgery, major surgery. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I never had major surgery in my life. And it was a whirlwind. And so we went in and had the surgery done and everything was fine. Came through the surgery. Great. And I was on my way to recovery. Then I got hit with Rocky Mountain spotted fever and pneumonia at the same time. And that was just about six weeks ago. So I'm kind of recovering from that right now. It kind of knocked me back about three months with my recovery. But believe me, you don't want Rocky Mountain spotted fever. It's not good. Well, what was going through your mind during this whole time, especially even when you heard the news, I'm going into surgery. They're going to stop your heart. I know what that's like because I used to do that. Yeah. It was, oh my gosh. Were you scared? At first I was scared. And then I got to the hospital. And Nina came in and she said, well, she just had put the announcement out that I had on Facebook that I had what I was going to have to go through.  And when she said that, I just felt like I was floating on a cloud. They had no worries, nothing, nothing like that at all. So I had to have the surgery. I had this, went into the prep room and of course had some of my family with me. When they left, there were some of the doctors or not nurses there that were getting me ready for the surgery. Gave me the shot, which only takes a few minutes. A few seconds, basically you go out. But as soon as she gave me the shot, they walked out of the room and I heard this voice say, I've got you. And I was like, I looked around like, where did they come from? And I knew that it was God saying, I've got you. Don't worry. And I didn't. I was like, I said, if this comes out the other way, I've had a great life. I'm just thankful. And I did. I came through everything okay. And it was just, I don't know, I was so thankful that God spared me a heart attack that I didn't have that to go through. And I remember a few hours later, they got me up to walk after the surgery and I walked and I was just eager to get back and get going. And when I got home for the first time, I sat on my back porch and of course it was during a cold time of the year. But I sat on my back porch and when I sat there, the sun was shining right down on me and the beautiful white puffy clouds and a blue sky. And I just broke down and started just thanking God. Just thankful. Just thankful. And I've been that way ever since. Trying to come up with words to say thank you and I can't come up with the words. But I know he knows I'm very thankful that he brought me through it. And I felt like he still has things for me to do. The purpose of my life has been to lift God up, lift Jesus to say how important he is in our lives. We need him today. We've always needed him. But in today's world, we need people not to be ashamed to talk about Jesus and I'm not ashamed to talk about it because of the things that... If you could be me and not be thankful and say how important he is to us in our lives, there's something very, very wrong with you, I think. Let's go back to where it started and how you were raised when you knew Jesus, the statler brother. So let's just kind of go back a little bit. My family sang since I was a little kid, number seven of nine children were singing church and things like that. So it kind of led me to going out, eventually getting my first guitar, having a band, and then going out and playing clubs for a lot of years, about 10 years of my life doing cover music in all these places. Of course, I knew about God. I knew, I joined a church when I was nine years old and knew about Jesus. It was more of a head knowledge than it was. But my life started falling apart about 1993. I had some things in my life that I needed to deal with. My family, my daddy was dying of cancer and my family life was falling apart. How old were you then? Oh, let's see. About this time. It was 1993, so I was born in 55. So what would that be? So you were already married then? Oh, yeah, I was going to have a marriage. And I had seven children. And so all that was kind of falling apart. I was trying to put it back together, but I was on the road and I just didn't have time to be home to put things together. I wrote a song called Too Much on My Heart, which was brought on by that situation. So anyway, we were on the road with the Statue of Brothers. I was leaving to go on the road and all this stuff was happening. I didn't want to go. I just wanted to stay home.  I remember we stopped in Little Rock, Arkansas. This was around March 1993. I remember I was just so depressed and just down. So down. But it was about two in the morning. I'm walking to find my room. It's foggy. And then it's hotel room out in the middle of nowhere. But it was in Little Rock, Arkansas. I found my way to this room and I went in and I just felt like so down. I understood if I didn't know Christ and I had enough knowledge in my heart about being a Christian and what it meant to be from my mama and still in that in me. I know how people think about suicide and things like that. But to me it was such a selfish thing that I would never do that and I knew that in my heart. But other people do because they get certain things going on in their mind and it just takes over and sometimes I think they're not responsible for that but they do it anyway. So I'm not putting people down for doing that because I do understand that. But for me, I sit on the side of the bed, turn on my lamp and beside the bed and there was a Gideon Bible and it was opened up. And it was laying there and I'm like, why is that open? And so I just looked at it and I said, what does God have to say to me? And it said, it was Jeremiah 5 chapter 25, verse 25. It was said, your sins and your iniquities have kept good things from you. And I sat down on the side of the bed and I said, whoa. I felt like Jesus was sitting right next to me and I felt like I was crying. I was looking down and I felt like if I looked at him there, I would see him. I really did. I just felt that he was that real. And then I said, no, I'm not going to look at you because if I look, I'm doubting that you're there. I said, I know you're there. I don't have to look. And at that moment I said, Jesus, come into my heart. It starts with me. It doesn't start with anybody else. All these other things and all these other people in life that were doing things that I would say, oh, I got to do this because they're doing it or I got to do this because whatever. It was me. I had to clean up. And so I said, come into every room in my heart. Just don't come into the living room because there's things back there and there are bedrooms and everything else that I don't want you to see, but I want you to see it all. And he did see it all. I knew he could see it anyway. But go in there and clean him out for me, please. Just every little thing I'd give it to him. He said, look past the sin and look at me. And he would always have his arms out like this. Give it to me. So I did.  I lost my father still. The things I prayed for I didn't want to lose. My family, my marriage, I didn't save that either. But he began to give me the things that I needed instead of the things I wanted. And you know, Jimmy, we're going to talk about it when we come back. Jimmy, what happened when Jesus started cleaning all those rooms? Well, I realized that just because you say you want Jesus to take over your life and come into your heart and clean out everything, that doesn't mean that things are going to go beautiful and that things are going to happen. And because life happens. But it gives you a peace inside of you that the peace that passes all understanding is the only way I know how to explain it. I didn't think I could ever deal with my father dying or my mother dying. I was just so close and just loved him so much that I thought I wanted to be as far away as possible. But God allowed me to be with him both times. And I felt the experience of death like that was a horrible thing in one moment but a most beautiful thing in the next moment because I felt their spirit leave their body and I felt them go to be with the Lord in that moment and the body was just laying there. The body was just a thing. And I'm like, I'm looking at it going, there's nothing there. And you wrote that song, I believe, for your... I believe was from that experience. Can you just think just a little... That is one of my favorite songs that you... It just touched me. Can you just sing a little bit of it? I'll sing the second verse and I don't have a guitar but I'll try to sing the second verse and maybe the chorus, I guess. But it says... Of 10,000 angels take her soul away To be crowned at Jesus' feet And I believe there's a place called... I believe in a place called Calvary That he gave and I believe for... Thank you so much. God gave me that song. I mean, it was a gift. Because I left Virginia. I'd been there 49 years and God asked me to leave and move to Nashville because I didn't want to. The physical part of me didn't want to. But the spiritual part of me knew I had to and I had moved everything out of the house in Virginia, my dream home up there. And I was standing on the deck saying goodbye and looked up and God gave me those words. He said, here's a gift. You honored me by doing what I asked you to do. So here's a gift for you. Thought about my mom. And that's been one of the biggest songs in my life. I know. It's one of my favorite songs of yours. Thank you. I appreciate that. So what was it like after that, leaving, coming back to Nashville? Well, it was hard at first because you're with one of the biggest groups of 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. I mean, it was... Well, tell me about the Statler Brothers.  There's been many God things in my life. This was one of them. But Ludewit suffered from Crohn's disease, who was a tenor singer for the Statler Brothers. He heard me singing at a ski resort in Virginia of all things. And when he was going to have to be out for about six months, he said, I heard this kid from the other side of the mountain near Charlottesville. He said, I think he could fill in for me if you give him a chance. I was the first name out of his mouth. So they called me up to come audition. I auditioned. And this is going to be in my book, which I'm writing now, hopefully, to the end of it. Long story. But they wanted to hire me for about six months to come in and fill in for Ludew. And Ludew decided that he couldn't come back after he was done his surgery and everything. So he asked me if I would do it full-time.  And sure enough, I had four new brothers in my life, and they took care of me for about 21 years.  And just all of a sudden, you're thrown into this world of, you know, meeting all your heroes. Well, all of a sudden, you know, I'm like going from this small town where I hadn't been anywhere all my life. And a few weeks later, you're sitting in an oval office and talking to President Reagan. And you got all this stuff going on. You're in Hollywood.  It was an unreal world to me. And then all of a sudden, I'm in the middle of it, trying to figure it all out, but it's like a whirlwind. And I just... I would sit back and listen and watch. Because I didn't feel like I could say anything.  You know, how did I wind up here? And so then I got these people talking to me like they know me, like all of a sudden. And it was just a weird... You became, you know, a superstar to a lot of people. Well, I mean, I had a hard time getting my heart around things like that. To me, I was just still all that, the simple person that came from Virginia, from nowhere. And the fact that somebody knows my name when I come to Nashville, I'm like, I can't believe it. And I'm still that way today. I'm in a world that I don't understand, but I grasp it and hold on to it and say thank God that he's allowed me a platform that when I do speak about God or Jesus, people listen. And because it's real, these experiences are real. And the simplicity of life, it can get complicated sometimes, but God has helped me negotiate it and deal with it. Like I said, when I gave my life to the Lord, didn't mean the bad things weren't going to happen in my life, but they may happen, but you can handle those things. Just like the heart surgery and different things that have happened. I've been able to handle it because of giving my life to him and saying he knows my purpose and he's going to help me attain the things that he wants me to attain for him, for his kingdom. You know, you're still very busy, still singing, still, and now you're writing a new book and the name of it is... Untold Fortune. Which is my life, it's Untold Fortune. And we're going to talk about it when we come back. Jimmy, tell me about your new book. It's called Untold Fortune and I've been in the process of writing this for about five years now. But every time I go to finish it up, something else happens in my life that kind of continues it on. But of all things, when I moved, I said I moved to Nashville about almost 20 years ago. I moved in next door to a guy named Dave Clark who is writing the story of my life now. He's a writer and he's written books. He's written also like 26 number one Christian songs and he's just... We only met like two years after I moved there at Monty Art and started talking and getting his relationship. Many God things in my life. This is one of them. I never thought that I would be a book written about my life. But when I started talking to him and telling him things about my life, I needed to write this. Because there are so many stories and so many facets of it that it doesn't just... He thought when we first started, maybe we'd started at the Stout Brothers and joined the Stout Brothers. But it goes back further than that. It goes on back to when my mom was born because I thought that was the most important part of the story. When my mom was born, she was two weeks old and my grandmother died. My granddaddy was having a hard time raising her and there was this lady who came from... My name is Ms. Grylls who moved from Nashville to come there to teach. This is in Virginia in a rural area that's way out in the boonies and it's like nobody ever goes there. Right? But on Ms. Grylls' way there and her husband, she was going there to teach. Someone told her about my granddaddy trying to raise those kids and my mom, what they call little bird is that she was just really tough. He couldn't keep up with her, right? So God spoke to her at that moment. She said, take me there. She'll want to talk to him.  And so she went there and her husband not too long after that passed away and when he passed away, my grandfather moved out of the house and moved into the smoke house where he had his bed set up and let her have the room in the house. And so he raised my mom until she was 18 years old. She taught her the Bible, taught her how important praying was.  And because of Ms. Grylls, I thought that's where the story began. It wasn't with me, with my life and music and all that stuff. Her life and what she did to make that sacrifice has influenced my family all along the way still today. The prayers that my mom prayed and that Ms. Grylls taught her about the Bible and the things, they're what's still happening today. And so prayer lives on. I don't care if you prayed that prayer 10 years ago, God heard it and in his time he's going to answer that prayer if you really mean it from the bottom of your heart. And so I believe that. I still feel my mom's prayers being answered right today because of Ms. Grylls, but the book is full of stories like that. Tell me about your new projects. You did God and Country and Brothers of the Heart. Brothers of the Heart, God and Country. God and Country is just one of a dove award for it not too long ago, for Album of the Year, Country Bluegrass Roots Album, I think it was. And it was about celebrating our God and celebrating our country and how important it is to have those two in God we trust where four words of this country was built on and I always felt it was very important. And that's a passion of yours, isn't it? That's a passion. It was my purpose to not separate. People want to separate. If we separate God from our country, we're going to be in trouble. Do you see it happening now? I see it happening today. It's funny because it's not funny really. It's sad, some of the things we see. But I also see the good side. I always see good people that love God, that are passionate about it.  It's in God's hands. It always has been. And there are things that you have to put in his hands and say, God help us with this, take care of this. And then there are times you have to take a stand about things. But I see where that's very important. And so I think that's why that CD did so well. It's a DVD as well. Gayther Music, that Gayther has been so good to us about putting us out there and putting our purpose out there through our music. And the Brothers of the Heart thing that you're talking about is teamed up with Ben Isaacs, Mike Rogers, and Bradley Walker. It's also a CD and a DVD that you can get in Cracker Barrel and especially you can get the CD in Cracker Barrel. You have to order the DVD from Gayther Music and order it off TV or you can get it from our website, all of our websites. Mine's at jimmyfortune.com. You can get on there and find out anything you want to find out about it. But it's been a God thing again. It's where I get to team up with my guys and brothers again from the Staddle Brothers to my new brothers with Ben and Mike and Bradley. It's all kinds of music. It's gospel, it's country, it's kind of pop. It's a little bit of everything that we go up and go out and take some of our favorite songs that shaped our lives and we redo them and we pay tribute to the song but also do it in our way, do it in our style. And it's been very, very effective, sold a lot. And you're on the road a lot now, aren't you? I've been on the road. I was out working six weeks after my heart surgery. I was out working full time pretty much. It has told the tale on me a little bit. I need to, especially when some of the things happened when my immune system got down a little bit and I struggled some. But the fans really understood.  Well, you're so loved by so many.  Just stand there. And I was like, no, I'm never going to do that. I said, I'm going to try to give you your money's worth anyway. And so I've tried to do that. And God's been good and faithful, helped me through a lot of things along the way. What would you like to share with those who are listening to you about your faith? I would like to share that, you know, God is faithful. And I always say the problems in your life that you can't deal with, if you are serious about what you have going on in your life, confront it, say what it is, and give it to Jesus. Because like I said, when he was dealing with me, he said picture me with my arms out and whatever it is you're dealing with in your life, look past it, give it to me. And that was a picture that I had and I would say, whatever I'm dealing with here, I'm just going to give it to you. And it changed my life. And he's still using you? He's still big time. So don't ask him to do something if you really don't want it, because he's going to do it. And that's a promise. Jimmy, thank you so much. You're welcome. Continue to bless so many people. Thank you for being with me today. I'm honored. Thank you, Terry. My friend, it only takes one person to change another person's life. Like Jimmy said, you never know what that next person is going to do and how many people it'll reach for Jesus. Do it today. Be that one person. This is today's Nashville. This is faith.


So, it is one of the most fantastic reports, it talks about once again TV growing, it talks about digitally growing at a huge space, but my primary understanding says that it is good for every sector that the way India is shining, whether you look at some few data points, whether you look at a number of footfalls on the airport, whether you look at a journey from 74 airports to 147 airport going to 200 airports, whether you look at day before yesterday the largest deal in aviation industry happened, ever in the history of aviation happened in the country. We are the 7th biggest aviation industry in the world, next year 2024 will be the third biggest aviation industry. My fundamental understanding is all this infrastructure is going to grow into advertising, all advertising grows, every sector will grow at any given point in time, the key thing to remember is customer centricity. What you are creating as a value for the customer, whether you are playing TV, whether you are playing digital, whether you are playing OOH, the customer needs enough and more for building brands and wherever you can engineer that there will be enough and more takers for value creation. The last point I would want to tell you is that we are somehow getting conditioned in our mind as TV versus digital and that is a dangerous proposition. The fundamental understanding in my mind is TV and digital, why because those small audience who come through digital over a period of time they will become big and they will need TV. TV at some point in time will saturate certain audience and they will move to digital. So it's a cross feeding funnel to get the maximum value out all you need to do is create that flywheel and that flywheel has enough and more for everybody to prosper and everybody to grow. Absolutely fantastic times. The report was fantastic. It's a great news for everybody and anybody into the media fraternity. I have always maintained that this is the best time in the history for anyone to be in media because there are everybody who wants to create brands and we can engineer that.


Goodbye, NETV. We've changed the name of our company. NETV Limited is now Freedom Family Limited. This is the name of our company in Hong Kong under which we operate. What does that mean to you? Absolutely nothing! Except one important lesson that I want to share with all of you. The lesson is the same as my one best tip to all of you for creating videos, which is create an emotional reaction. Originally we thought NETV was a great idea. Get all your content on any TV, any device. But freedom became so popular we realized it's a much more emotional name. Be free versus get your content on any device. No lock-in contracts versus get on Daily Motion and Youku and other platforms, which is more emotional. Freedom, of course. So we made the decision to completely change NETV Limited to Freedom Family Limited as the company name. Now that means nothing changes for you. Again, it's just a corporate branding that is behind the scenes. But here are some tips that will help you grow. How to go viral on Imager like the station did in this post seven days ago. The link to it is down there in the description below. And they got 140,000 views in just seven days by hitting the front page of Imager. See? Here are their stats. Are any of you already using Imager to market your brand? Tell us down there in the comments below your best practices. What did you learn? What works? What doesn't work? So we can all help each other grow together as a family. Which, incidentally, is the spirit of freedom. Some tips I can share with you about this article is do something funny like this cat tax. And be straight to the point. A five second elevator pitch. You can see how this starts. Clear gameplay from the game, the station. Then it gives more gameplay with very short text describing what is going on. Those are key elements to become popular and possibly go viral on Imager. Here's something else really cool. Michael Hasing from Ruin sent me this video that represents 100,000 characters in a game at 4K resolution all animated at the same time. I've never seen this before. It looks like Lord of the Rings. But it's actually a real game. This isn't pre-rendered. This is a game engine running. Tell me in the comments below if you know what game this is. I will tell you but I'd love to know if any of you have seen this before. It is the ultimate epic battle simulator and it has been greenlit by the Steam community. The link to this is down there in the description below. Yesterday we talked about YouTube Super Chat right here. It's a new revenue stream that YouTube launched and it's donations. It replaces fan funding but you do need to have a thousand subscribers on your channel to enable it. How many of you asked a great question? Will the revenue share from Super Chat be the same as your YouTube channel or will it be something different? So before we make a final decision I want your input. Tell me down there in the comments below what you think is a fair revenue share for Super Chat earnings. We will take all of your opinions into consideration before we announce the final revenue share split for your Super Chat earnings. So this is your chance to influence a decision that will affect the entire Freedom Family. All you have to do is tell us your thoughts and why. Click that I to see the video behind me to learn all about Super Chat so you know what I'm talking about. We also have the George Challenge going on right now. Click that I to see this video, not the Pirates video but the challenge video that talks all about the challenge. Good job Captain Obvious, try again George. We also have the George Challenge happening right now, a fitness challenge for all of you, Freedom Family. In fact everybody on YouTube. Click that I if you want to accept my challenge and here is today's update. Hi Freedom Family, here I am on G floor to do my ritual. Again I really don't want to do it today. It's a little after midnight. Now I want to go to sleep but what's the point of a ritual if you give up? So let's go G to 40 again. And I want to see you doing this in your videos. Don't give up, follow your ritual and let's get fit together. Here we are on the 10th floor, 25% of the way. Let's keep going. And now halfway, 20th floor. Alright, now the mystery floor 30. Where they wiped out the number but 10 more floors to go. Pass 39, one more floor to go. Push it, push it. And there we go, 40. My name is George and today's ritual is complete. Today is February 10, 2017. This is what I want to see in your videos Freedom Family and each of your videos with your ritual achievement every day. Whatever it is, lifting weights, doing stairs, swimming, playing badminton and your videos to inspire your audience to show the Freedom Family that you can do it to motivate everybody to do it too. I have been doing those stairs twice a day, not just once a day, because I really want to get into shape. And I want you to get into shape with me. So let's motivate each other and keep sending links to your exercise videos down there in the comments below so I can add them to our official The George Challenge playlist. And who am I? I am George Sunpai, Papa George, General George, and many other names. You, the beautiful Freedom Family, has given me. I am George, CEO and founder of Freedom. Little Freedom for Freedom and the Freedom Family and the Music Factory for all you musicians out there. We will have more updates regarding music composition that will help you get custom music for your videos and live streams. Click that I to see the exciting announcement about the Music Factory and hear all about it from Ben Messonette, who is coming here to the Philippines in about a month to get busy on constructing a music studio for composing music, as well as recruiting a team of composers who will create custom music for all of you. Are you excited about this? Tell me in the comments below. I certainly am. George, and you've been watching. Click that I to partner with Freedom and join the Freedom Family so we can all grow together. You get many perks like position music. You also get epidemic sound, a lot of other access to royalty-free videos, sponsorships, and many things to help you grow. Just click the links down there in the description below to get involved in our community, our forums, our Discord chat servers, meet our graphics team, meet our community team, all of that on Discord and the forums. What are you waiting for? Get started. And we will grow together as a family because this is the Freedom Family. You are part of it, we are all part of it, and we're all growing together. To get more George, click that big F. That will subscribe you to Freedom Central, home of The George Show. Click the Freedom Family plus one video to see I'm having a new baby number four. And the $60 million video to see the $60 million coming to Freedom to help you grow.


We have discussed ultrafast processes in molecules at length, not really at length because it is really a vast field, we have talked about only some of the processes, we have not talked about even things like freight that we promise to discuss and we have not talked about photoisomerization. Ultrafast dynamics in molecules is really a very rich field which has been pursued for a long, long time and there are thousands of good papers that one needs to read. But then in this course we cannot really go through the entire body of literature that is there in this field, we can only introduce you and then it is up to you to read and learn more. So and we have to finish in a given time frame as well, so what we will do now is that we will keep molecules aside and we will move on to things that are of great interest over the last 20, 25 years, so we will talk about nanoparticles. Today we are going to talk about plasmonic nanoparticles to start with then we will talk about what happens when you break down nanoparticles further, is there something between molecules and nanoparticles that is called nanoclusters and today we are focusing on things like gold. When you talk about nanoparticles generally you would be interested either in gold, silver all these things metal nanoparticles or you would be interested in semiconductor nanoparticles. We have done a lot of work on silica as well but for now we will not get into that. So after this we are going to talk about semiconductor nanocrystals, solar cells and perovskites. So for now let us begin our discussion on plasmonic nanoparticles. What is the meaning of a plasma? What is a plasmon can somebody tell me? That is phonon, quantum of vibration is phonon. See electron is like unit charge right, quantum of charge, phonon is quantum of vibration, photon is quantum of light. Similarly plasmon is also quantum of something, what is that something? The name suggests that it is plasma, plasma we have studied from childhood that it is the fourth state of matter, plasma essentially means ionized gas. Now here we are not going to work with gases, we are going to work with what happens when you ionize the gases you set electrons free. So plasmon is essentially a quantum of free electron that is present mostly on the surface of metals. So this surface plasmon have been of lot of interest over the last 25 years or so. One called localized surface plasmon resonance is quite well known, more or less well understood and it has been used extensively to do things like augmentation of signals, enhancement of fluorescence. So you might, well I do not think I mentioned this earlier, we have talked about radiative rates and non-radiative rates. Now generally in whatever molecules we have discussed so far we have only talked about suppression of non-radiative processes so that the fluorescence quantum will goes up. But there is another way of doing it. The other way of doing it is to play around with the radiative rate. Of course you understand radiative rate constant is directly related to Einstein's B coefficient which is related to epsilon. So you are basically saying how one can increase epsilon and one way of doing it is by using plasmonics. Joseph Lackiewicz especially has done a lot of work on this, he started with silver islands and then he worked with silver nanoparticles as well. So using it what you do is you enhance KR. What happens when you enhance KR, radiative rate constant? Fluorescence quantum will goes up right but lifetime goes down because do not forget lifetime is 1 by KR plus KNR. So KR appears in the denominator of lifetime. So lifetime going down with fluorescence quantum will going up provided no mistake has been made is a sure shot signature of what Lackiewicz likes to call radiative rate engineering and that is done by using plasmonics. In fact nowadays SPR spectrometers are available commercially where one can enhance the signal from weakly emitting samples and all and it is used extensively in things like sensing. So that is why surface plasmon resonance is interesting and useful. So now where does it come from? We will paint a very, very qualitative picture actually there is a lot of theory that one needs to discuss if one needs to understand surface plasmon resonance quantitatively. We will not try to do that in the limited scope of this course, we will just point you to this picture that is available I think even in Wikipedia. So what happens is in metals why are metals conducting the simplest theory that is used to describe conduction of metals is that of free electron, free electron theory right. So where one says that since the work function is small all the electrons are more or less free they can move easily and so on and so forth. So what happens is these electrons form sort of a cloud the free electron and then you have a hard core that is the metal nanoparticle, noble metal nanoparticle we are going to talk about gold almost exclusively we will refer to silver and platinum and nickel ones but in this discussion as well as in the nanoprocessor discussion we will talk mostly about gold that does not mean gold is the only thing other metal nanoparticles also give very good surface plasmon resonance. So what happens is this is the gold nanoparticle let us say and this is the cloud of electrons you can think. So this cloud of electrons can oscillate and what happens when they oscillate if the cloud of electrons goes up then in this ensemble the top portion is slightly negative partially negative and the bottom portion is slightly positive so you create a dipole when it goes down then the bottom portion is slightly negative the top portion is slightly positive okay. So what you have essentially is you have an oscillating dipole due to the movement you can think of the surface plasmon that is almost always depicted in this manner you see the surface plasmon going down then this side is minus and here the metal ions you can say are exposed a little bit so this side is plus and here it is the opposite phase. So now what you have essentially then is that when the surface plasmon going up and down you create an oscillating dipole moment once again let me reiterate that we are painting a very very qualitative picture here. So what happens when you have an oscillating dipole if you remember what you studied in basic molecular spectroscopic courses why is it that polar molecules are microwave active because when the dipole moment rotates the z component of dipole moment fluctuates it goes up comes down to 0 goes to the opposite direction and keeps on oscillating here also this oscillating electric field is set up and you can think that that electric field can interact with light that is incident on it okay and that is why there is an absorption remember in the classical picture absorption of light is always associated with resonance between the electric field of light and some kind of fluctuating electric field in the molecule or material whatever it is. So when the frequencies match of the oscillations that is when resonance is achieved and light absorption takes place alright. Now this frequency of oscillation depends on several things first of all composition you might think what am I talking about and we have said gold nanoparticle so why where is composition coming from we will come to that in a few minutes geometrical shape if it is a sphere or if it is a rod or if it is a prism we have different kinds of oscillation in fact when it is a gold nanoprism you can have many kinds of oscillation so you have a really broad surface plasma resonance and nature of the chemical environment what do you have around it do you have a coat of silica do you have polymer do you have solvent even that is important and we will see why that is important before that let me show you at least one spectrum of you can see this is one of the earlier works 2019 years ago this is the kind of spectrum that you expect to see in well what we conventionally call absorption spectrum okay. So what you can see is at 2.5 nanometer you can see a band forming here 4.6 15 16 nanometer now here the band has become prominent and it is quite sharp right then when you make bigger nanoparticles when you go to 120 nanometer there is a further redshift and then it becomes really broad for different reasons we are not going to that is not really what we want to discuss today what we do want to discuss is what happens after you excite this so essentially when you excite the molecules this excess energy not molecules sorry nanoparticle this excess energy in the nanoparticle and it has to equilibrate it equilibrates by several mechanisms first thing that happens the fastest one is electron electron scattering right. So you have this electron here a lot of electrons around remember it is a plasma right lots of free electrons are there so electron scattering gives rise to reinstatement of the ground state if you want to call it that okay the other thing that can happen is that you can have electron phonon coupling phonon is basically this lattice vibration right when we talk about solid now you cannot talk about normal modes of molecules anymore you must talk about the vibrations of the lattice as a whole as we have seen earlier in this course many new kinds of vibrations can arise when you are association like what happened in water remember what happened in liquid water we did not have just the symmetric stretch and bend and symmetric stretch we also had liberational motion and that too were of different kinds so similarly here in lattice which is an even more associated system you have different kinds of vibration and these vibrations can be activated further if the excess energy is transferred to them that is called electron phonon coupling and then what happens is if you remember what happened in water you excite one mode of vibration and then the energy gets transferred to things like liberation right the same thing happens in the crystal lattice as well one kind of phonon transfers energy to another so that is called phonon phonon coupling that is how the heat gets dissipated heat means excess energy here gets dissipated okay I should mention here that for the initial slides I am grateful to my student Bala he is the one who made it and he is the one who sort of taught us in our group about surface plasma resonance and stuff alright so now this electron electron scattering is the fastest and we will show you some data later that takes place in hundreds of femtosecond really really fast then you have electron phonon coupling that takes place typically in 1 to 4 picosecond and phonon phonon coupling is the slowest step that takes place in 100 picosecond. So let me show you another diagram other than this where the relaxation is divided into two kinds radiative and non-radiative the non-radiative processes are essentially land out damping involving electron hole pairs and elastic scattering which causes defacing and radiative decay consists of well scattering of photons and there is some what you can call fluorescence as well we are not going to discuss the topic of photo luminescence of gold nanoparticles but I will give you a recent reference at the end this is an interesting thing that has come up over the last 5 years or so it makes sense to read it by our sense. What we will do is we will mostly present to you literature from this review that was published well 8 years ago it is by Heartland so let so what this review does is that it discusses in a good amount of detail the dynamics post excitation of noble metal nanoparticle nanostructures this is one review that I recommend that everybody should read we are not going to discuss everything in the module today there will be a lot of things that are left for ourselves to read alright so let me start with by showing you a transition piece of transient absorption data recorded by Elsage group link at that time was a student opposed dog with Elsage so what you see is this one on the top for your reference is the extinction spectrum that I showed you a little earlier this is your surface plasma resonance band and the main feature the dominating feature in the transient absorption spectrum is a ground state bleach that exactly corroborates with this band and what link and Elsage and other people did was that they looked at the ground state bleach recovery dynamics and they got 2 time constants you can see the trace here 2 time constants 3.1 picosecond and 90 picosecond 3.1 picosecond was assigned to electron photon couple phonon coupling and the longer 90 picosecond component was assigned to phonon phonon coupling so what did they not see what is it that they missed that means something right there are 3 processes so electron electron scattering is missed because it is too fast for the resolution of the set of the used we are going to show you some data there as well now this is a very important difference between molecules and materials when you talk about materials and you want to do pump probe spectroscopy with them some interesting feature arises well you have seen earlier in case of seven as a indole also that if you pump at higher energies lower frequencies what happened there there was an additional first component due to s2 to s1 relaxation right or due to relaxation of s2 just you can say so something similar but more prominent happens in nanoparticles because you see the absorption is really a continuum except for that it is not a continuum but there is a p and then it just goes up so you in principle you can excite in you can pump in many many different wavelengths but if you pump at higher energies not only for plasmonic nanoparticles but also for semiconductor nanoparticles interesting phenomena start showing up especially for semiconductor nanoparticles so that is what we will discuss in one of the future modules so here what is important is when you want to talk about some time constant you should not forget what the pump power is one thing is you can excite at higher energy the other thing is if you excite by a greater pump power then a lot of interactions can happen and this is an example of heartland group as early as 2000 what they showed was that you look at these decays at different pump power the tau the electron phonon coupling time constant actually goes up right that is due to further interactions that are there now what they showed is that first of all if you look at this time constant how do you know what the time constant is so what they did is in this graph in the inset they extrapolated it to 0 pump power so this is sort of like the infinite dilution we must have read right actually you cannot achieve infinite dilution but you always extrapolate and find out what it is so by extrapolation they found that at notionally 0 pump power the electron phonon coupling time constant is equal to 0.65 picosecond which interestingly is exactly the same as what is there for bulk hold with increase in pump power the time constant becomes longer the time constant becomes longer means what coupling is more efficient or less efficient yeah less efficient why because radiative not radiative the rate constant is actually reciprocal of tau right so when you talk about coupling you have to talk about the rate constant and then the interesting thing that they showed here is that this time constant they got when they plotted against diameter and again this is a semi lock plot where the x axis is logarithmic so that they can show data from say 3 nanometer all the way to 120 nanometer the time constant remains exactly the same irrespective of the size of the nanoparticle okay this is one thing. Now let us see an example where the electron-electron coupling is actually observed experimentally this time it is not gold it is silver this is the work of Brewer and coworkers once again way back in 2000 here you see what they have done is they have done an experiment at a very good resolution full scale here is one and you can more or less understand how many points there are it looks like a straight line isn't it a little uneven straight line so wherever there is change in slope that is a point so there are there are may be 500 points or more within this 0 to 1 picosecond time window and also note the quality this quality is excellent right it is a linear scale y axis is linear there you get this kind of data I mean if I will not tell you that x axis is in picosecond and I tell you it is TCSPC data you might believe this is excellent data so that is why they could get this small time constant data quality has to be outstanding if one wants to talk about very precise measurements so this electron-electron coupling time was found to be where is the electron-electron coupling time here excited and then see there is a rise right why is there a rise because equilibration has to take place among the electrons that are there first you have done a quantum of excitation that has to get redistributed among all the electrons before anything else can happen so that comes up actually as a rise and this rise time is found to increase from say 100 femtosecond to 300 femtosecond the second second plot depending on what the nanoparticle radius is right now do not worry about what this line is or what this curve is just look at the points remember this silver and it increases from actually their observation was with 2 nanometer so there about 150 femtosecond time constant was there and it went up to 300 femtosecond and from the data you can see that the trend is there it is not an oscillation a fluctuation once again it is impossible to get believable data I mean it is impossible to differentiate between 300 femtosecond and 150 femtosecond if you do not have data of this kind I am sure this was a very very painstaking experiment especially 19 years ago okay. So we have talked about spherical nanoparticles so far gold and silver and we have shown you what the electron scattering time is in the last slide and we have talked about electron phonon coupling as well phonon phonon coupling is just the longer longest time scale that you have here. So this is where we will end this module in the next module we will talk about gold nanodots and composite nanoparticles.


The state assembly constituency's elections for Ethiopia West and Burutu North in Delta State were conducted peacefully as Dalton's tripped out to vote their preferred candidate. Our Asaba correspondent, Friday Apomigeru, who monitored the exercise in Delta State, reports that electorates praised the independent electoral commission as beavers worked effectively in all the voting points. The vote is very nice, the election is peaceful and calm, and by God's grace everything is going well. No stress, no stress, everywhere is very cool. So far no record of violence is peaceful and everybody according to themselves is a free and fair atmosphere. You can see for yourself, we are here to vote peacefully and let the vote count. The resident electoral commissioner, Delta State Itekamba Udo Umoren, monitored the election and thanked Dalton's for their peaceful voting as voting was concluded in Ethiopia West at exactly three o'clock in the afternoon. Parliament is a positively charged, the enthusiasm is well established and the people are voting normally. They are very peaceful. There is no record of any argument of fighting or disturbance so far. From what I've seen, the electorate has conducted itself very well and I'm sure they are voting for the candidate of their choice. You can see for yourself, the election is peaceful. My primary concern is to see that people come out to vote without being intimidated and the security arrangement, you can see that people are very free and they are casting their vote. I'm impressed with what I've seen so far. There is a relative peace. You'll notice that even the voters, because I've had to ask at each of the units, should they say no, how about the diverse, they said they are working. They started in the material, they said no, they were all the materials and the voters are very happy because for them, the important thing is having the materials on ground and for that reason, there are no complaints. I also thank them for the general peace I have met in each of the places we visited.


International Women's Day to everyone. If you were joining us for the first time today and would like some Japanese interpretation in your ear, please go to the back to grab an earpiece. Thank you so much for joining us at the third keynote session as part of C. Hub's annual symposium, which as you know brings together bold ideas and innovative thinkers to explore themes that enhance our ability to foster excellence through inclusion. And this year's International Women's Day focus is invest in women, accelerate progress. The speaker you're about to hear epitomizes these themes. It is my absolute pleasure to introduce you to Catherine Dignasio, an associate professor of urban science and planning at MIT. She is also the director of the Data and Feminism Lab, which uses data and computational methods to work towards gender and racial justice, particularly in relation to space and place. Catherine is one of those brilliant people whose curiosity knows no bounds, which has allowed her to work outside traditional boundaries and bring people, groups, and ideas together in creative and meaningful ways. Her presentation today, which will be delivered online as you can see, is entitled, A Feminist Approach to Data Science and Communication. She will speak for about 30 minutes and then we will have time for your questions. Without further ado, let's give Catherine a warm, oist welcome. Hello everybody. Here, I'm just gonna take a second to share my screen. There we go. All right. So, yes, good morning. Evening for me, but morning for you and happy, happy International Women's Day. I think that's fantastic that I get to celebrate with you even before it's my women's day here. So I'm Catherine Dignasio and I'm going to be presenting about A Feminist Approach to Data Science and Communication. And I do just wanna mention, I'm very grateful to Kathy Takayama for the invitation to be with all of you here today. So first, I just wanna thank the Wampanoag people and the Massachusetts peoples on whose lands I am a guest and on whose lands I completed much of the work that I'm speaking about today. So what I'm speaking about comes from Lauren Kline and I's book called, Data Feminism. This was published by the MIT Press in 2020. And in the book, we present seven principles for doing more ethical and equitable data science. And these principles are based on the teachings of intersectional feminism. So first today, I want to talk a little bit about our motivation for writing the book. So why is it important to bring feminism and data science together at this particular moment in time? I also wanna define what type of feminism is informing our work because there are many feminisms. And then I wanna show some examples of the seven principles of data feminism in action. So that's our roadmap for today. So just to get started. So as Lauren and I were writing this book, we were increasingly aware that data was becoming a tremendous form of power.  We were learning from Sophia Noble who wrote the book, Algorithms of Oppression from authors like Virginia Eubanks who wrote Automating Inequality. We also were looking at the work of Joy Borumlini and the Algorithmic Justice League who have been doing some amazing work to showcase racial bias in facial recognition system and algorithms. And what all of these books are pointing to is the fact that data are indeed incredibly powerful. However, that power is wielded unequally. And more specifically, it's wielded by a small and homogenous group of corporations and other well-resourced institutions. So these are the ones that have the resources to design and deploy data and AI systems. And when they're only deploying AI systems in the service of their own profit, it comes at the expense of everybody else. And this is where feminism comes into the equation. So what we explain in the book is how feminism and in particular intersectional feminism has been focused on precisely this, on imbalances of power and on the structural forces that cause imbalances of power for a very long time. So in other words, we might be looking at these new systems like artificial intelligence or algorithm, chat GPT, large language models. But the basic idea that systems are optimized for certain groups and not for others, this is not at all a new idea for feminists. So one of Lauren and I's main motivations, in fact, for writing the book was because the popular press who kept writing about data and algorithms, they kept being surprised. There's always this surprise coming out in the news that this or that system is biased against women. Like it's demoting women's resumes, for example, for a hiring algorithm or a soap dispenser that is racist, that doesn't dispense soap for dark skin. So all these examples of bias and the journalism would throw up their hand and be like, how could this soap dispenser be racially biased? Like that must be impossible or how could a hiring algorithm discriminate against women? But in fact, in a sense, maybe I should just back up. So we were just frustrated by the fact that there was always surprise at these things because as a feminist, we can say that these kinds of flaws or errors in the system, they're not surprising at all. In fact, they are completely predictable, but they're only predictable if we know to draw from feminism and or other theories of social inequality. Okay, so we'll come back to the principles of data feminism in just a minute, but first let me back up and give you a very short introduction on feminism. I don't know where people in this audience are or whether people have ever taken a class in women and gender studies. And most people, if they know anything about feminism, they think that feminism is about women and that's correct, but there's more. So feminism at its core entails a belief in equality for all genders. And so if you hold this belief, if you think that all genders of people are equal, this is a feminist belief. So it's a belief, first of all. But secondly, if you take a look at the world around you, you can realize very quickly, in fact, that this goal of equality of all genders has not been realized in the world. And so that brings us to the second definition of feminism, which is that feminism is political action. It involves political activity to realize this belief in equal rights for all genders. To make that goal truly a reality in the world that we live in. And then feminism has a third definition. And this is that it's a set of theories and ideas. It's an intellectual heritage. It goes back decades and even centuries where thinkers, activists, writers, poets and artists have thought about this problem of why we don't have gender equality. That is the basic starting point of feminism. And they've theorized it, they have taken action. But what it also means is that we have guidance from the past to think about issues of inequality today. And these, this guidance, feminist thinking, feminist intellectual heritage begins by thinking through with respect to sex and gender. But then the past 40 years of scholarship and also our current political reality have brought many more dimensions of inequality into the conversation, including race, class, sexuality, ability, immigration status, and so many more things. And so this brings us to the core sort of feminism that Lauren and I are drawing from in a book, which is intersectional feminism. So this is a type of feminism that comes to us from the work of women of color feminists and black feminists in the United States in particular. And this perspective takes the position that we can't only think about sexism in order to understand inequality. And so we get this idea, people think about this idea as being new, but in fact, this is an old idea. It was proposed at least as far back as the 1800s by Francis E.W. Harper, for example. And she and others are theorizing directly from the experiences of black women who at the same time face both sexism and racism. And so Kimberly Crenshaw uses the metaphor of the intersection to talk about the place where these two forces come together. So racism and sexism compound and combine. And so we have to analyze them together. We have to look at them together. Other intersectional work has built off of this work and looked at other forces of oppression. So things like classism, colonialism, ableism, and other dimensions of structural inequality. And so what we get from intersectional feminism is a framework to critique structures of power to understand why certain people may experience oppression on the one hand or privilege on the other hand. And so intersectional feminism helps us open up some of our analytical tools and make our analysis more complex. So really think about like, what are the root causes for why these inequalities exist in the world? So what we do in data feminism is we draw from these teachings of intersectional feminism, along with other ideas from feminist activism and critical thought, in order to arrive at these seven principles for doing more ethical and equitable data science. So the principles are these, and I'm not gonna explain them right now in depth because I wanna give you examples of what these principles look like in action. So there are things like examine power, challenge power, rethink binaries and hierarchies, elevate emotion and embodiment, embrace pluralism, consider context and make labor visible. And one of the things I'll draw your attention to is that we actually have two principles about power. And this is because of this sort of analysis of unequal power and analysis of inequality is so central to the feminist project. So if we're starting to try to rectify inequality, first we have to understand it. We have to examine power. And then secondly, we have to challenge that power. We have to think about how do we rebalance so that things are structured better. And so the goal of these principles is to really think about how do we use feminism to do data science? It's really about like how do we draw from it but to inform practice, to inform our work with data science and also to inform our work with data communication and visualization which I'll talk more about in just a minute. In the book it's structured like this. So we have one principle for each chapter. And what we do is we try to talk about the feminist theory that let us formulate that principle and also give multiple examples of that principle in action in the work of data scientists, data visualization designers and other folks working with data. So to say like the stuff is already happening. People are already elevating emotion and embodiment in data. So as a way of illustrating these principles in action, I'm going to pivot and discuss some of the examples that we talk about in the book. So one of the first points that we make, I will actually maybe I should back up. One of the connections that I wanna make in our present moment, many of you have probably been a part of and seen all of the hype about chat GPT and large language models and AI. And I certainly hope at your institution you're talking about these things because these are big public conversations right now. We still talk about data feminism even in the midst of all this AI hype to call us back to the idea that all AI algorithms and large language models are ultimately powered by data. So a lot of the biases and inequalities that we see in these algorithms and in these chatbots and so on, these are models that are reproducing data problems. So I just want to sort of make that connection or make that link between data and AI, since AI is so much in the news right now. So one of the first points that we make in the chapter about examining power, the first chapter is that data bias, so bias in our data sets, it starts even before the data set exists. So in data feminism, we use the example of this artwork. So this is an artwork called the Library of Missing Data Sets. It was created by Mimi Unwocca and we use this to talk about this a little bit. So she makes the point in two ways. First, this is a GitHub repository. It's a simple list on the internet and it's a list, it's the list that you see depicted on the right. And it's a list of data sets that do not exist in the world, but that Mimi Unwocca thinks should exist. So these are things like trans people killed or injured in instances of hate crime, people excluded from public housing because of criminal records and so on. So these are sort of urgent and interesting data sets, data sets that the public would benefit from, but no institution is collecting this information. And then there's a second way to see this, which is the artwork form.  And each of these data sets is tagged as a tag on a single folder. And when you're the visitor in the gallery, you can go through and page through the files in the file folders and you can look at the names of the data sets that are missing. But when you reach in, you take out a folder, you open it up, there's no information in the folder because no official data have been collected about that topic. And so the point that the artist is trying to make is that these data sets are missing for a reason. And the reason is that there's a really profound imbalance of power with respect to data collection in the world today. So who has the power to determine which data are important to collect on which data are not important to collect? Generally speaking, it's governments and other money institutions that make these decisions. And generally speaking, minoritized groups, community-based groups do not have the power to build and then maintain these large data sets. So this is why a feminist approach to data and to AI begins with an analysis of power because far too often even just the data that we have access to, this has already been over-determined by the imbalance of power in the world. So there are many things, many urgent and important things that we don't have information about. And they follow along, I should say too, the connection point here is they follow along gendered lines as well. So for another example, kind of building on this idea of missing data, feminicide is another very profound case of missing data sets. So in the book, we tell the story of Marias Casalguero, she's a Mexican citizen. And so she resolved to head straight towards this problem of missing data and collect the missing data herself. So for those of you who don't know, feminicides are gender-related killings of women and girls. They include cisgender and transgender women. Feminicide is a human rights violation. So it's recognized as one of the most egregious human rights violations by the United Nations and other international institutions. It is legally defined as a crime in almost all countries in Latin America and that includes also in Mexico. But the state, even though there is a law in the books, the state does not collect systematically data about feminicide. So Marias Casalguero was frustrated by the lack of formal action on this topic. And so she has single-handedly compiled the largest archive of feminicides in Mexico. And so how does she do this? So since 2016, she has spent two to four hours a day logging these cases on a Google map. So the Google map that you see here. And she finds them in media reports through WhatsApp group chats, through attorney general websites. And then when she finds information, she puts it in her database and logs it on her map. And so using this map, which is now an eight-year-long archive, she has helped families locate loved ones. She's provided data to journalists, to NGOs. She's testified in front of Mexico's Congress multiple times. And so in data feminism, we talk about this as what you might call feminist counter data. So this is a kind of a activist data collection that steps in when the state and other institutions have systematically failed to ensure the basic safety or the basic rights of their population. And so this is one way that one could use data to challenge power is this collection of counter data. And I just wanna take a moment to mention that writing about Maria Salgaro's work in Mexico led me to interview her and then that led me to interview other people like her. And it turns out there are many data activists working in this way on the issue of feminist side globally, not only in Latin America. And subsequently I've ended up undertaking a collaborative project for the past five years, which has culminated in this book that is coming out next month called Counting Feminicide. And so in this book, I describe some of the creative and intellectual and emotional work of feminist side data activists. So again, this idea that data activism is a way to challenge power and a way to push for social change. But let's keep going. So we've also seen, so kind of continuing with this thread of missing data and also with this idea of examining power and challenging power, we've seen another example of missing data play out very invisibly in training data for large language models. So these are the models that drive apps like chat GPT, for example. So what we know about large language model data, the training data, aside from that fact that it's large is that it comes from the internet. So vast quantities of internet data have been sort of harvested to train these models. And so the internet is many things, but what it is not is a full and equal representation of the world. The internet data, if you think about platforms like Reddit or Tumblr or things like this, it skews young, it skews male, it skews towards the US and the global North, it skews towards toxic speech, all right? And it is certainly not the source of truth that people interpret the output of chat GPT to provide. However, the makers of LLMs, including OpenAI and others mostly do not disclose their training data. So we basically have no way of knowing or testing or auditing just how biased these models actually are. And so a recent paper released with chat GPT or GPT-4 explicitly disclosed the data sets that had been trained on. And that's what this post is talking about here on this slide. And, but we can still reverse engineer these systems. And so this has been the subject, I think, of really interesting work. Again, with this idea of challenging power, how do we peer into these black boxes and examine some of their biases? And so one of the things that Lauren is involved with right now, led by a graduate student at Berkeley named Lucy Lee, involves trying to reconstitute some of the training data so it can be more closely examined for biases. And so one of their findings so far with this work is that even within English language training data, meaning like all of the texts are written in English, texts that comes from certain regions of the world is deemed as lower quality texts by the model. And it ends up being excluded from the training data in higher percentages. So this is consistent with other research that has showed how AI plagiarism, often, or the plagiarism detectors often flag non-English speakers or non-native English speakers at higher rates than native speakers for plagiarism. There's a kind of bias against non-native English speakers. So up till now I mainly talked about examining power and challenging power in data sets and data systems, but how do we make data science and AI processes more inclusive? This is why this idea, this principle of embracing pluralism comes in. So to formulate this principle, we drew from fields like human-computer interaction and participatory design. And these have long track records of research around public process, participation, and co-design. And in data feminism, we characterize these approaches as embracing pluralism. And so what that means is listening and learning from a wide range of sources of knowledge and perspectives throughout the data science and data communication lifecycle, including the part of like training models, annotating data, training machine learning models. All of these are things that are opportunities for participation and for involving more people in the process. And so, yeah, I'm gonna keep going. I'm not in the time when I don't have that much time. So I'm gonna keep going if I can tell you about a couple more principles. And so this idea of participation is something we've actively mobilized in my collaborative project about feminicide. This is the project my new book is based on. And so what we've done on this project is we've worked really carefully to bring together these data activists across Latin America and globally who are working on the topic of feminicide. And we bring them together to build community. We bring them together to conduct qualitative research. And we have brought them together to do co-design and participatory design of AI and machine learning technology. And one of the things that has come out of this is that the several tools that we've built with activists where activists have participated in all stages of the data processing pipeline. So we've worked closely with activists to conceptualize digital tools. We've worked closely with activists to annotate training data, to train models, machine learning models, and then to evaluate those models as relevant for their work. So the main takeaway here is that AI, data science, computer science, and then data communication all have a lot to gain by this idea of involving people, real-life people at every stage of these what we typically consider to be more technical processing. Okay, so the previous examples have focused mainly on the issue of power and people, but a major idea that comes with feminism has to do with critiquing binary structures of power. Feminist theories have helped to show us how binary distinctions are often hiding hierarchies with one group on the top and another group on the bottom. The distinction between the idea of man and the idea of woman is the obvious reference point here. So typically we inherit the common sense idea of gender, which is wrong, which is this idea that there are two genders. So first of all, this is empirically wrong, right? There are more than two genders. But second of all, what we see as a gender binary often is hiding a hierarchy, right? Because often actually it's the men that are on top and the women are on the bottom here. And so feminists in general are very skeptical of binary. So when we encounter a binary, how do we think about this and use this to question other binaries and hierarchies that we encounter in the world? And these would be things like the distinction between nature and culture, between subject and object, or what this next example takes up, which is the artificial distinction between reason and emotion. So in an Anglo-Western context at least, we've been taught that reason is somehow better than emotion. We see this play out in data communication in particular. So often the best practices for data communication involved a very clean design, very minimalist aesthetic, is kind of like just the facts sort of presentation. But in data feminism, Lauren and I question that and we say, why? Why are these our best practices? Minimalism, neutrality, kind of a flatness of affect. Why are these our best practices? Especially when research shows that emotion helps us to learn, it helps us to remember things and it helps us to connect with each other. So what about visualizations, data visualization, that deliberately leverage emotion? And that's what this next example helps us think about. What you're actually looking at here are screenshots of animation. So what happens here is that these arcs that you see on the screen, if you go to the webpage, they get traced out one by one. So there's an arc, there's an arc, and then they speed up and then they start to come very quickly onto the screen until the picture builds and the picture is this one that you see in front of you. And what this is showing is the number of gun related deaths in the United States in 2018. So each of the people killed by a gun in that year is represented as one of these arcs on the screen. And the arcs are traced one by one, but then they get faster and faster and faster. So it's very overwhelming to watch. It's almost really unbearable to watch it. And that's exactly the point. So it's an animation and a visualization that it just goes on for too long because there are too many people being killed by guns in the US. It's an epidemic. And I should say this, just to explain this a little bit, on the bottom here is a timeline. And so each arc that goes across the screen is one person's life.  And the gray part is what they would have lived to, the age that they would have lived to if their life hadn't been cut short by violence. Catherine? So the data are very sound. They come from a national crime data set. It's very statistically sound. And yet when this first came out, this was viewed with suspicion by the visualization community because it made us feel. It was communicating with us through emotion. And you can see that here where the number of the statistics go up and it computes the sort of speculative statistic of many, many, almost a half a million stolen years. And so people were like, yeah. You had asked me to tell you when you're at 30 minutes and you're here, we're here. Oh, good. Okay, great. I just have one more slide after this is perfect. Thank you. And so people were suspicious because it made us feel things. It was a visualization designed to provoke emotion. But a feminist approach would say that it's not a problem at all that it made us feel something. In fact, it's more compelling as a visualization because it blends emotion with reason. And so in the chapter about elevating emotion and embodiment we talk about how we can rebalance our data communication toolkit to really think about how we balance reason and emotion. And we can talk more about this in the Q and A of folks are curious. So the final point I want to make is probably obvious, but it's just that data feminism insists on an expanded definition of data science and data visualization and an inclusive approach to artificial intelligence. And if we expand our definition of data science we can see that some of the most exciting work in the world today is being done by artists, by journalists, by community organizers, librarians and activists. Some of this work does look like traditional data science but other work looks like artworks, data-driven sculptures and artworks, data murals, data-driven journalism. And so we have hundreds of examples like this in the book which we selected to illustrate our points and inspire people to action because just as data might be at the root of many of our problems today in the world we think it can also be part of the solution. So yeah, thank you so much. It's truly an honor to be part of this symposium. There's many ways to get in touch with me and I'm really looking forward to the Q and A and comments that you all might have. Thank you so much. Excellent. Thank you, thank you, Catherine. We have about 10 minutes for questions which I know isn't enough. Nonetheless, Catherine has assured me that she's open to any and all questions and we recognize of course that we come to this topic, to these topics from different history and different experiences. So we have the mics at the ready so please raise your hand and we will run right over to you. Hi Catherine, I'm Huang Hun from Singapore. I have two concepts that we think quite a lot about in feminism and what that is, third space and the issue of questioning the logic of the dominant hierarchy. I do hear some of the echoes in the seven principles but I would like to hear a little bit more elaboration on that. The third space concept, is that what you're advocating for in that whole continuum between objective data and subjective narrative? And is that supposed to be introducing a new logic? Is that clear? I think I did hear the two concepts that you mentioned. I'm sorry, maybe the audio is a little bit muddy. Heather, is there a way you can repeat the two concepts at the same lunches? Third space and logic. Logic and logic. As in logical structure because the dominant hierarchy has already defined a certain frame. So I'm just wondering whether in this meeting of this redefining of data feminism, is that a way of talking about a new third space? Is there a way of challenging the logic of the institution? Yeah, great, thank you. I think I understand the question. Yeah, I think what we're trying to do is take some of the logics, it's really it's an epistemological move and it's to say, how do we think about other ways of knowledge creation that are not only, like how do we bring one of feminism's contributions, right? Is to expand who's at the table in knowledge production. That's where the pluralism idea comes from, to say that many voices produce a kind of more robust knowledge, so like kind of expand who's present in the knowledge making table. But also to say that there's not only one way to do even data science, right? Which we tend to think of as something very quantitative, something that has a kind of very specific set of methods, but what we actually show in the book is that data science, especially again, if we've used this expanded idea of data science, data science can involve community based participatory work where people are painting murals, you know what I mean? From conversations about data and statistics. And so it also has to do with how we define data, which for us does not mean only quantitative information. It also means, it just means any systematically collected form of information. So we could be collecting photographs, like any kind of archive can also be considered as a form of data. It could be qualitative data, could be testimony, could be stories. And so I think those are some of the feminist moves to, yeah, I think kind of come into the cracks of what is perceived as a kind of very rigid frame of like data, data science, quantification, also something that's like yielding a lot of economic value and say actually there's a whole different way to do these things and here's what it consists of. So I'm not sure that entirely answers your question, but hopefully that starts to answer your question. I was going to say it's a big question. Perhaps I can invite you to follow up. Maybe we can share the contact information after. While folks are thinking, oh, Melanie, please. So this is a sort of a reflection and a comment, a question to Catherine and also to my scientific colleagues. So I work at OIST, but I'm not a scientist. And I was very, very intrigued by the point you drew out about putting emotion or judging emotion as somehow lesser than reason. And that's another really big topic as well about how that came about and so many links to what you were talking about, about how history has determined how we frame things. But, and also how women are seen because women are often identified with emotional responses in the workplace. But this is actually partly just a kind of comment on that and say how stimulating I found that was, but also a bit of a question to any of my scientist colleagues here today because science, the kind of conventional, successful scientist and conventional science I think as a non-scientist, it elevates rational decision. It actually, and this is very much to your data point that data numbers are regarded as somehow having the authority and they safely inform decisions and everything you've been telling us this morning shows that definitely needs to be questioned. So I'm really interested in what my science colleagues think about how that hierarchy between reason and emotion actually informs their working lives and how they feel the model of what good looks like, what a good scientist looks like and how those values are reflected in the career structure and career progression. And leading on to that is what efforts we can make to change those, to enrich those things. So thank you for such a stimulating point. I don't know if you have a response over here or another question. Hi, yeah. No, just responding to that as a scientist. I think as an emotional scientist. So for me throughout my career, obviously the science is the science but when you want to communicate your science and especially when you're trying to communicate with maybe audiences that not so accessible. So audiences that aren't really necessarily really wanting to be engaged with your science. I have used work with artists to enable me to do that. And so I think that sort of allows you to bring in that emotion but it's really interesting in working with an artist because they have a very different approach to their work in that their whole experiences, the whole life experiences, everybody that meet everything comes into their work. Whereas a scientist were traditionally taught that that sort of gets left at the door and it's the same as women when you're pregnant, you're not pregnant at work. You can't be pregnant at work. So, and all those things. So I think there is something. And also I talked yesterday about being neurodivergent and being one of the things that I do a lot is sort of I jump, I have, and people would call that, oh it's female intuition. And again in a very derogatory way. Whereas I can see things big jump away. And so that's how my research works is that I take big jumps and that's what enables you to be a really good scientist. But it's put back on you as a negative thing because the logical thing is to do thing in a very sequential little step sort of way where yeah, she will get there. But yeah, so I think, yeah, lots to discuss. Thank you. As it happens, we have our PsyArt consultant in the front row here today. So that's a wonderful connection. Katherine, maybe we have time for one more question but I can already see all the discussion that you've stimulated. So I think our breaks and our lunch hour will be buzzing today. Yes, one more at the back. Great. I just want to comment and build on the previous comment. So I think for some, it's important to recognize that for some scientists, while there's a sort of shared norm across modern sciences to sort of leave yourself at the door of the lab, like outside, that some scientists are forced to do that more than others. And a lot of how scientific concepts are structured and how data are analyzed. For example, let's say talking about biological sex in terms of strict binaries. When you actually start looking at that, there are variations in sex characteristics that vary along various spectra. And so it's really a more dynamic and multi-dimensional, high-dimensional variable. Biological is what we mean, what we usually talk about with biological sex but that's usually compressed down to binary categories. And that for maybe most scientists who maybe happen to be cisgender and no sex, so not intersex, that doesn't appear as a problem because that fits their everyday experiences of gender and sex. But for transgender scientists like me and other people, maybe also intersex scientists, that categorization automatically leaves them out as aberrations or outliers and we don't really make it into the data or we're kind of marginalized in the data by the structure, the analytical structure itself and the concept, binary concept itself. But we're kind of forced to play along with that most of the time because that's what other people have done and that's what a lot of literature is based on. So we need to kind of address previous findings from a literature, so we have to play along. And so we're forced to leave out our own experience of sex and gender at the door, which I think is unjust and needs to be recognized more and I think this goes for many other systems of oppression as well, along racial lines, for example. So I just wanted to comment on that. Thank you, thank you very much for adding. I'm so sorry, but we have to wrap here, the day is ticking on. Please remember to respond to the symposium survey and you can be entered to win a copy of Catherine's book, Data of Feminism. To all of you here, thank you so much for joining us for this presentation and for the symposium. Thank you for bringing open minds and curious outlooks. And Catherine, thank you so much for sharing your time, expertise and passion. You have given us much to think about and please stay on the screen after we just wrap so that we can get a photo with you in the background. I think that's because I must thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you.