Welcome to Intro to AP Computer Science for new AP teachers. In this video, we're talking about writing objects. Now, we've done a little bit with this already. We've actually created some classes. We've created some objects. We talked about setters and getters. But now we're going to talk about some of the other types of methods you might want to create and talk a little bit about constructors as well. So, we're going to look at static versus non-static methods. There's just a quick, you know, explanation of that there is a difference or different types of methods. I will get more into that later. In this case, we're looking at non-static methods. So, these are methods that, as you'll see, are attached to objects. Talk about the default constructor, which we've actually been using. We just didn't really explain that we were using it. Talk about how to do non-default constructors. The two-string method, which is kind of important, and a little quick introductory exercise. So, static versus non-static. So, static methods and attributes are attached to the class. So, we've seen that before within the recursion unit in the non-static or in the static methods unit as well. We've gone over these things. So, for example, you know, number of students. Okay. So, the class has a certain number of students. The number of students is not a quality of an individual student. That's the example I gave, I think previously. Non-static methods and attributes are attached to the objects. So, for example, if you have five students, those five students could be in five different grade levels. They could be the same grade level, but not necessarily. The grade level of a student is a quality of that student, not all of the students collectively. That's kind of how I try to explain it. So, non-static method format. It's very similar to static methods. So, they may or may not have a return type. They may or may not have arguments. But the big difference is you'll see here, there's no static here. So, public or static methods had public static type method args. This one just has public type method args. And again, outside of the static part, okay, return type, no return type, or you know, return type or void, arguments or no arguments. So, there's four possibilities that are just like with the static methods. So, here's an example I like to give. So, a person may say a greeting. So, public void say greeting because we're not returning. And system.out.printline high. My name is this.name plus period. So, the example in the book is ironman.say greeting. And you know, hi, my name is Tony. So, this is what that particular object would say. Now, if it was Captain America, Captain America dot say greetings. Hi, my name is Steve. So, you kind of get the idea there. Because each object, each person in this case would have their own name. Now, people can have the same name. We know that. But generally speaking, names tend to vary. Default constructor. Okay, so again, I haven't really talked about this before. Maybe mentioned it in passing. So, thus far, we have instantiated our objects. And then, let's just say changed their attributes like so. So, class says the class, the object name equals new class. So, you notice there's this is empty. And then we did object dot attribute equals value. In the last unit, we learned object dot set value set value. We use our setters instead. So, however, we can create our own custom constructors when we write our classes. So, just like we did with overloading static methods, we can do the same. So for example, class type attribute, this dot attribute equals attributes. So, for example, playing card. So, we may have string name and string suit. So, this dot name equals name, this dot suit, suit. Now, we could do, you know, just card without the arguments, and then do, you know, card dot set name, card dot set suit, that's possible as well. But what we can do is to shorten that, we can just do it when we create the object. So, the constructor is a special method that is called when the object is created when it's instantiated. So, you notice there's no public here. It's just the same name as the class. Notice it's capitalized as the class is capitalized as well. So, it's a special type of method. Now, if you don't have a constructor, if you didn't put one in, there's a default constructor that takes no arguments. And that's what we've been using all along. But finally, we're learning how to create our own. So, as I mentioned, just like with other methods, we can overload that constructor. So, we could have a constructor that has string string int. And we can do that. Or we can have a characters has string and string, and then it would call this. So, depending on the method call, it will call the correct constructor based on the signatures that goes back a few units. All these concepts hopefully will be familiar to you and your students. And that, you know, we keep reinforcing them every couple of units. Two string method. This is a special method that is called when an object is printed. So, the format is public string to string. And it returns, this is just going to be a blank line. This, it returns some sort of string. So, when I do system.out.print or system.out.print line, whatever goes here is what's going to get printed on the screen. So, for example, back to my card class. So, public string to string will return this name plus this suit. So, my constructor, card, card equals new card. And it's the ace of spades. You probably guess why I chose that one. And then, if I do system.out.printlin card, it will print a, you'll see an a and a spade on the screen. So, yeah, you need to know that. So, our interesting exercise. So, is choose an object and just what we've done all along, come up with three attributes of different types, and write three different constructors using any combination of attributes. And then instantiate some objects using the new constructors. And at that point, you can do your setters and getters, and see if you can print out that information. So, this is a bit more, you know, hands-on to do some coding. You can do it, you can do it in paper, you can do it in pairs, you know, you know, your students. Some students prefer to work alone. Some students prefer to work with a partner. My students love working with partners. So, I do that that way.  Yeah, I think. Oh, okay. So, just quick review. So, we did, we looked at static versus non-static methods. The non-static method format basically, same static minus the static keyword. Talked about the default constructor, finally, even though we've been using it all along. Talked about non-default constructors and overloading, just like we did with static methods. Looked at the two string method, which is very, very important. And hopefully a little introductory exercise that'll help you kind of introduce and cement some of these ideas in your students' heads. Thanks for watching. Take it easy.


Thank you, everybody, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for coming out. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Thank you, thank you. Hello everyone, I'm Carlin. And I'm Shannon. And together we run a unit called the Digital Knowledge Center here at the University of Mary Washington. Our office is just upstairs. The Digital Knowledge Center is the unit that empowers students on our campus to be digital creators. That's right. Founded by our own Martha Burtis. Applause for Martha Burtis. Yes, yes, I'm part of that work is digital fluency of course, so we work with students so that they can consume and produce digital knowledge ethically, critically and responsibly. And to go with that is our patented program, Reclaim Digital Fluency. And we do this through three pathways which we call our tiers of engagement. That's right, the tiers of engagement. And our first tier is workshops. We give students a platform to share their knowledge with their fellow students. The second tier is fellowships. This is where students can take a deep dive into a passion project. And the final tier is jobs. We hire some students to help us do this work of empowering digital creators. And together these three tiers form the pyramid of digital fluency. That's right, our patented pyramid scheme of digital fluency. Actually, they're not tiers. It's not tiers at all. They're not tiers. They're really, they're more like, they're like prongs. Prongs, yes. The prongs of engagement. Prongs of engagement. Forming the trident of digital fluency. Yes. Yeah, lovely. Karlyn, why don't you tell us about Prong One? Sure. Let's take it prong by prong. Our first prong is workshops. Students come to us with an idea or a topic that they want to share with the community. Now, sometimes we do prime the prong a bit. We pick out some topics in advance, but usually people are bringing stuff to us. Yeah. We've had, we've had alumni bring us workshop topics. We've had our own student staff. And we've had students from all across the university in all different departments. Yeah. So after we get these proposals, the next step is the jam. This is like the secret sauce to just about everything we do. It's a highly collaborative process, but it's kind of more like this kind of jam. Yes. So we sit down with the students or more often we stand up in front of a whiteboard and we hammer out a framework for this workshop idea around the topic they're interested in. What's the next slide? Right. Okay. There we go. So once we jam thing, oh rehearsal, I think this is where I'm talking about. Yeah. So when we lead out in the weeks leading up to the workshop, we schedule rehearsal, which we try to do as much as possible in show conditions, right? We want them to use the slides they've designed, go through the hands-on activities they want as part of the workshop, and critically, do it in the space where the workshop is going to happen. Now, what I was supposed to say before Carlin talked about the rehearsal was, you know, when we get together and jam with students, we don't want workshop to feel like an assignment like they would have in a class. It's really the synergy between the students' knowledge around the topic and now our pedagogical know-how. But yes, then we move on to the rehearsal and then I'm going to skip right over back to that, back to me. So once we are done with the rehearsal, it's an opportunity for us to give students feedback about what we just saw, right? We can try the hands-on experiments that they might do and, of course, technical issues always arise. So you've got to work that stuff out before you let them lose. That's right. And then it's time for the show. We do a brief introduction to all the student workshops, but after that, students take the wheel. It's their show. They've done all this prep work. They run it themselves. Now, you may be wondering, how do I get people to come to workshops? Good news. It markets itself. It markets itself. With a tremendous amount of work on our part and our student staff, we put a lot of effort into the marketing, actually. Here's a little glimpse of our marketing task list. We put a lot of work into the marketing because the students put a lot of work into these workshops. And so we want to make sure we get, we make it worthwhile by getting eyes in front of them. Yes. Between us, our student marketing coordinator, our student workshop coordinator, we try to get the word out just about everywhere. Here's some of our lovely abs. You may be wondering, what are the benefits of a program like this? That is an excellent question, Carlin. So obviously the student body, they get to learn some new skills. They're learning from other students, and they get to connect other students that might be interested in the same things they're interested in. The presenter gets to share their passions, right? They get to get up and talk about what they love. And this is a recipe builder, something that they can point back to once they are done with Mary Washington, something that they did. Gosh, I sure love workshops, but we have two more prongs to get to. Carlin, why don't you tell them about Prong 2? Prong 2? Don't mind if I do. Prong 2 is fellowships. This is where we take a deeper dive into a passion project with a student over the course of a full semester. They submit an application, we review them, and then we meet for an initial meeting where we design a project contract. So this project contract contains the timeline, what are the parameters of the projects, and some deliverables that we'd like to see. Sometimes it's process documentation so other students can do what they did, or maybe we ask them to present at the research and creativity day that we have here at Mary Washington. That's right. Can we hammer out that project contract? At the end of the semester, the student delivers us a fabulous project. Easy as lion. Well, you're forgetting, Carlin, there's a few more steps between project contract and fabulous project. We do have to meet the students. We have to meet with them, and we have to meet with them, and we have to meet with them, and we meet with them again and again and again throughout the semester. That's true. We have found that even with our most responsible students, we have to have these regular meetings to make sure they're understanding what we're looking for and sticking to the project timelines that we've set out. That's correct. But after all that, then we do have fabulous projects. We're going to show you a little bit of some of what we've got. We had a student this past semester. She has crazy dreams and wanted to visualize them. So along with this, and you can actually see it on our media wall, you'll see the non-audio version kind of coming up every now and then. We made some process documentaries to talk about how did they go about doing this. So I'll put the audio mix. Uh-huh. Yeah. We've bludged out and made some media video. In this first video, I will be discussing my entire pre-process of how I've storyboard and how I do my shot list, et cetera. I designed the antagonists first because they are probably the most important design that I have. And then I moved on to the setting. And then I went back to the protagonists that we follow. Next up, there is filming and editing. We had another student who, over the course of the semester, designed and 3D printed their own practice bagpipe. So throughout the semester, they printed several disinversions. They did impact testing on their different designs. They had a number of failures. And then in the end, had a design that they were proud enough of that they branded it with the UMW logo, which you can't see in this slide, which you can see it over there, and printed enough for all of the pipe band here at Mirror Washington. Yeah. So what are some of the benefits of this? So the fellow obviously gets to deep dive into a passion project. Like, how awesome is it that you get paid to make videos about your dreams? And then the student body gets a variety of potentially infinite things that they might get because the deliverables are based on each project. So maybe it's workshops. Maybe it's process guides. But it can just be just about anything. Prong 3. Prong 3 is jobs. This is where we hire 10 to 12 students in a year to help us do all of the work above, as well as all sorts of other things. So we have a kind of pretty traditional hiring process. But it's worth pointing out that we actually have a student hiring committee. So the committee gets together and makes recommendations to us about those things. And we do spend a whole semester training these students so that they are ready to be full-time consultants come to fall. Oh. Yeah. Here they are completing their training. You can see there are a fun bunch. This is the honor of the nighting ceremony once you have completed your training. Love the people. You may be wondering, what kind of work do these students do? And the answer is just about anything we can unload on them. So their main job is consulting with their fellow students, right? Helping them with their digital projects. A particular domain of one's own. Getting started with that. We see a lot of those consultations. But also doing projects to help with the various things we've shown. Writing online guides about different digital tools. Doing class visits to introduce a tool or introduce our services. And all sorts of other things. Running workshops, training the new staff, all that. Yeah. The best part is we can kind of tailor what students want to do to it. Maybe their strengths and their interests. They often come to us with projects. Hey, I want to do this thing. And it's a one-off thing and we have something. But sometimes a student comes to us with something great. Do you remember Prong One? Prong One? What was Prong One? Workshops. Thank you. That was brought to us by a student who was like, I think it would be really great if we did workshop. So she started and it's part of what we do now. So thanks, Mandy. Thank you, Mandy. So you may be wondering what are some of the benefits of jobs, right? The student body obviously gets support in digital projects. It makes the work that we do possible. We didn't have students helping students. I don't know how we would do it at this scale. And I hope the consultants get a myriad of, you know, benefits. But some of them are just those practical things like job skills. They have resume builder. They have something they could talk about when they leave. They can point to tangible projects that they have done. So there you have it. Workshops, fellowships, jobs. The three prongs of engagement forming the trident of digital fluency. Now, you may be wondering, is this scalable? No! Do you think that you are going to be able to take this stuff and apply it to all the incoming freshmen of your, you know, institution? You're going to have a bad time. You may be wondering, will this save me time? No! This sort of high touch work with these students means that our calendars are full of meetings every week with students on all these various different projects. It doesn't save you time, but you do have those connections to them. You may be wondering. Does it have easily measured outcomes? No! Of course not. We do collect data, you know, attendance and all these things. But high touch, you know, model, it means there's a lot of qualitative feedback. Lots of great stories and students seem to love this, but you can't just show people some numbers and demonstrate the impact in a simple straightforward way. Now, you may be wondering, will I build meaningful human connections this process? Yes! We get to work one-on-one with these students in a very high touch way, right? And this means we get to know them and we get to tailor the work to our passions, their passions. You may be wondering. Yes, will students get practical, applicable experience? Yes! Of course, I think you've already seen several times they have these projects that they've done. They've wrestled with not only delivering that, but like coming up with it. These are all things that, you know, they're eager to show their future employers or wherever they're going next that they've done stuff. Absolutely. Now you may be wondering. Will doing this resurrect my faith in the work of higher education from the ashes of doubt and cynicism, leading me to rediscover the beauty and potential of human connection and collaboration and renew my sense of hope and purpose while also providing a transformative experience, not only developing students who will excel in the workplace, but can encourage them to be better versions of themselves and inspire them to rage against the dying of the light? Yes! This work feels meaningful. It definitely is impactful.  Interested in learning more? Good news! Operators are standing by! At the bar after the conference. In the spirit of high touch, meaningful, one-on-one connections, we have not saved time for questions, but we are happy to talk to you at the bar afterwards or in the Discord. Feel free to ping us. Yes, so thank you for coming with us to help reclaim some digital fluency through our prongs of engagement. Thank you! Thank you very much! Thank you! Thank you, you've been great!


This is the Big Picture, an official television report of the United States Army produced for the armed forces and the American people. Now to show you part of the Big Picture, here is Master Sergeant Stuart Quain. Following World War II, the major British colonies in Asia received their independence and Communists seized control of the Chinese mainland. The result was a changed balance of power in Asia. The first of October 1949 has turned out to be a date of great importance in world history. It was on that day that the Chinese Communists announced the establishment of their regime. The Communist regime at Peking is founded on the principles of Marx, Lenin and Stalin and on Mao Zedong's concepts of new democracy. When the Chinese mainland fell under Communist control, twice as many Communist-dominated people were added to the list as there are Communist-dominated people in the Soviet Union. Little more than a year after the Red Chinese regime was established, it showed its intentions in Korea. Two years, Red China's massive armies fought the forces of the United Nations to a stalemate. While the war raged in Korea, Red China was also flexing her muscles in another part of Asia. With her support, the Communist-Vietnam forces were able to drive Vietnamese and French forces from the northern half of Vietnam. Today, the Chinese Reds have succeeded in splitting Vietnam in two and have established a Communist puppet government in the north. China's massive and still-growing strength is felt throughout Asia. Aside from the military, it exerts political and economic pressure on its neighbors. India is the second most populated nation in Asia, the second most populated nation in the world. India follows a neutralist policy. The nation is making great strides in developing a working democratic form of government. But if it is unable to satisfy rapidly enough the needs of its people, India might well turn to the left. And this could not help but have its effect on some neighboring countries. The island nation of Ceylon, off India's southern tip, has already swung to the left. Ceylon, like India, has adopted a neutralist foreign policy. But communists in Ceylon are agitating for closer ties with the Sino-Soviet bloc. One of India's neighbors on the east is Burma. Burma's political leader, Unnu, is a genuine neutral in east-west affairs. But he has no sympathy for communists at home. The Burma's army has fought untiringly against communist insurgents during the nine years of guerrilla warfare in Burma's northern provinces. Southeast Asia's newest independent country is Malaya. Communist guerrilla forces there have all but been eliminated. Some of the guerrillas have been seeking refuge along the Thai border, a problem which is now being dealt with by the two countries. The island nation of Indonesia today is split by internal strife. President Sukarno has called for guided democracy, a concept which among other things would allow communist participation in government. But many elements in Indonesia are dissatisfied with this and with other central government policies, and some have revolted. The communists seek to exploit this situation. The Republic of Vietnam, of course, is strongly pro-western. Cambodia is trying to maintain its neutral status. And Laos, bordering China, is under tremendous pressure from the communists. Even before the Indochina truce agreements were signed, it was clear that an offensive alliance was needed by the freedom-loving countries of Asia. Five nations, Pakistan, west and east, Thailand, the Republic of the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand joined with France, Great Britain, and the United States to form the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization called CETO. Here now to describe CETO's organization and its contribution to our mutual security program is the commander-in-chief of United States forces in the Pacific, Admiral Felix B. Stump. Asia and the western Pacific is a vitally important part of the world to the United States.  If this vital territory should come under communist control, the future of the United States would indeed be heavy with burdens. One of the steps which have been taken by the United States to diminish aggression in Southeast Asia and to preserve peace and freedom is to join the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, popularly known as CETO. CETO is a collective security organization among eight nations which have interests in this part of the world for the purpose of maintaining peace and freedom in the western Pacific. CETO is a very young organization, only four years old, but the nations which belong to it are wise in the ways of communist imperialism and the slavery which always goes with it. Most of the CETO countries are thousands of miles away from America and people here at home don't know much about them. It is necessary that every voter in the United States in our free country understand the issues which are vital to the United States. I hope today's motion picture will give you at least a small insight into those nations. In what follows you will be introduced to five of the CETO countries, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Thailand and the Philippines. Bangkok lies on the banks of the Chowkriya River near the lower edge of a vast alluvial plain. Bangkok is often called the Venice of the East. The city is crisscrossed by thousands of canals called clones. Thailand, once known as Siam, is a deeply religious nation. The majority of its people profess the Buddhist faith which finds expression in many beautiful temples. The Thai are also proud of their traditions of freedom and independence. Lying in the shadow of red China, Thailand is highly conscious of its strategic position in Southeast Asia. Since 1950, the Royal Thai Army has been following a program of modernization designed to increase the total combat readiness of its tactical units. Its aim is to create an effective defensive military force organized on modern lines. Today, Thailand's army is four times the size it was less than 10 years ago. Thai soldiers fought valiantly with the United Nations forces in Korea and a regimental combat team is still stationed there today. When the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization was formed in 1954, Thailand was the logical choice for CETO headquarters. Of the five Pacific member nations, Thailand is the most centrally located. Frequent conferences help coordinate the work of the Permanent Council which is composed of representatives of the armies, navies and air forces of the CETO members. Under the terms of the treaty, the eight members agree that they separately and jointly by means of continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid will maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack and to prevent and counter subversive activities directed from without against their territorial integrity and political stability. Each of the members has something unique to contribute to the mutual benefit of its partners. Beyond the defense organization, moreover, there are forces at work to promote economic and cultural exchange. Australia has been called the world's smallest continent and the world's largest island. Its capital, Canberra, is in population one of the smallest cities in the country. It lies in the eastern mountain range and is surrounded by wheat and livestock farming countries. Australia is a commonwealth. Its government is constitutional and embodies ideas found in both the American and British governments. Populated chiefly by people of British origin, the Australian way of life is essentially British but since World War II, American influence has greatly increased. Actually, Australia is evolving a national character all its own. The country itself is about the same size as the United States. Much of it is farm or ranch land. One of the principal industries is sheep raising. Throughout its history, Australia's economy has been predominantly agricultural, with the greatest emphasis placed on ranching. Sheep growers and their families are found in most of the fertile sections of the continent. Like the settlers of the American West, the Australian sheep rancher is a hardy pioneering type, independently minded and jealous of his personal freedom. Possessing about one-sixth of the world's sheep, Australia produces about one-quarter of the world's supply of wool. On the whole, Australian wools are unrivaled in quality and at times have brought unparalleled prices in the world's textile markets. An indication of the relative importance of the sheep and wool industry is seen when human and sheep populations are compared. There are approximately nine million Australians and some 130 million sheep, 14 sheep for every man, woman and child. Because of the size of Australia and the wide variations in climate, shearing goes on virtually the whole year round. Wool is exported either raw or as Australian textiles. A constant reminder of Australia's contribution to allied victory in World War II is Melbourne's War Memorial. Australians are as determined today as they were then to defend their country and its democratic institutions. Separated by vast expanses of ocean from the Free Nations of the West, Australians are sharply aware of their position in the very shadow of explosive Asia. Members of the National Service Battalions and the other branches of the Australian Armed Forces undergo intensive training so that should the need arise, they will be ready to fulfill Australia's commitments to see them. As much as any country in the world, the people of Australia young and old are air-age conscious. At Royal Australian Air Force bases like Richmond, Australian and American exchange pilots welcome the visits of members of the Australian Air Cadets, an organisation of teenage boys whose keenest interests are in the air. Periodic flights with experienced pilots give the cadets a first-hand knowledge of subjects studied in classes on the ground. Australians young and old possess a long history of devotion to the principles of liberty and democracy. Through CETO they seek to preserve them and to help maintain the freedom of the other member nations. Southernmost of the CETO nations is New Zealand. Unlike Australia, New Zealand is a dominion with its capital at Wellington, a port city surrounded by sharply rising hills. The city was founded in 1840 by the first colonists who arrived from Europe to settle this island nation. Like Australia, New Zealand has a constitutional government. Its legislature consists of only one house, an elected house of representatives. As in Australia, the leader of the majority party in the house is the Prime Minister. Education in New Zealand is compulsory up to the age of 15. The government provides liberal scholarships for higher education. The main source of power in New Zealand is hydroelectric. It is put to a variety of uses on farms and in industry. In recent years, New Zealand has been making increasing use of geothermal power, which utilizes the heat under the earth's surface to generate steam power. At Wairaki on the North Island, engineers have drilled down nearly a mile to capture the energy used in creating electric power. Since 1949, all New Zealand men have been liable for a 10 and a half week period of military training on reaching 18 years of age. This is followed by additional service during the next three years. Following six years, they remain members of the military reserves, a ready reserve of trained manpower to swell the ranks of the regular army in time of emergency. In size, the New Zealand Royal Air Force is almost equal to the army. Many squadrons fly the famous vampire jets. On short notice, these planes are ready under the terms of the CETO agreement to come to the aid of a fellow member, which might be the victim of an aggressor's sudden attack. Pakistan, fourth of the five Pacific CETO countries, has been an independent self-governing member of the Commonwealth of Nations for little more than a decade. Largest city in western Pakistan is Karachi, a well-planned port city with over a million inhabitants. Here, the ancient and modern worlds exist side by side. In the bazaars are delicate ivories and embroidered brocades, Baluchistan carpets and Cindy glassware. Even today, the traditional snake charmer still buys his trade in the crowded market place. In population, Pakistan ranks sixth among the nations of the world. In many parts of Karachi, Pakistani families live huddled together in overcrowded disease-breeding slums, which have existed for centuries. But since British-occupied India was divided into the Dominion of India and East and West Pakistan, the government has made continuing efforts to provide more and better housing for the people. As a young nation, Pakistan is fully aware that its future growth and prosperity will depend in large part on today's younger generation. As a result, special attention is being given the educational system. Today, women are enjoying new educational rights too. Though a country predominantly Muslim, Pakistan is breaking with many of the older traditions of the world of Islam. Since its creation in 1947, Pakistan has tried to make the transition from a holy agricultural nation to one with heavy industry. American aid, economic and military has helped her toward this goal. In many parts of Pakistan, the camel still provides the chief means of transportation. The journey from the mountainous Afghan border to Karachi on the Arabian Sea may take many months. While East Pakistan's chief product is jute, West Pakistan is known primarily for its cotton, which represents the country's largest export commodity. The government's present economic policy calls for the development of large-scale industries for processing Pakistan's own raw materials and for producing consumer goods for the home market. The growing textile industry is proof that the program is well underway. In overcoming its many problems when it was first created as a separate nation, Pakistan's principal asset was the spirit of its people. The enthusiasm which founded the nation has been re-channeled to generate strength and stability. Pakistan's national draft calls for seven years of military service. The Pakistani Navy is small but effective. Its officers and men are expert seamen with many years experience in the British Navy. Its chief job is coastal defense. It is in the Pakistani Air Force that the greatest advances in modern military defense structure have been made. Little more than a year ago, the Pakistani Air Force flew nothing but propeller-driven aircraft. Today, its Air Force has been converted to fly F-86 jets. Pakistan represents Sito's western cornerstone in Asia. Its people are wholeheartedly committed to defend the principles on which Sito is founded. The Republic of the Philippines, once an American possession, represents Sito's cornerstone on the east in Asia. Its capital, Manila, is one of the most modern cities in the Orient, badly damaged in World War II. Manila has been rebuilt. Today, it boasts many fine shops and stores. The Philippines is one of the world's largest lumber-producing countries, ranking fifth in the ratio of forests to total land area. Commercial forests make up almost half of the land area of the Republic. Sugar is one of the five crops on which the Philippine economy is chiefly based. Climate and rainfall are ideal for raising sugar cane. In the Philippines, as in most countries of Asia, rice is the principle staple food. Because of work animal and machinery losses during World War II, rice production after the war was only half the pre-war level. Today's output of rice, however, far exceeds pre-war production. Fish and rice are to the Filipino diet what meat and potatoes are in the west. The fishing industry ranks second in importance only to agriculture. Nearly 2,000 different species of fish are found in Philippine waters. Although annual catches are at an all-time high, the Philippines is still obliged to import fish from neighboring countries to meet its own needs. A freshwater fish program is one of the government's answers to the pressing need for a bigger fish and fish product industry. Although Seto headquarters are now in Bangkok, Seto was actually born in the Philippines in September 1954. The Republic is one of the organization's most active members and holds maneuvers regularly. Communist agitation is familiar to the people of the Philippines. For many years after World War II, the country was plagued by red bandits called potters. As a charter member of Seto, the young republic has pledged itself to defend its own freedom and the independence of others. Seto's planners are preparing studies on the defense of the treaty area as well as mapping plans for cultural and economic exchange between the member nations. There is a common pool of intelligence information available to all the member countries. This close cooperation in peacetime helps to establish in advance the mutual confidence which would be needed for joint operations in case of war. Periodically, the member nations of Seto hold joint maneuvers to test how quickly combined forces can be mustered and delivered to possible trouble spots in one or another of the partner nations. Such exercises also serve as reminders to the people of the member nations that they do not stand alone and that their independence is protected by a multi-nation shield. Your objective of Seto is to combat foreign-directed subversion against the political independence of nations in the treaty area. In many cases in the past, infiltration and subversion have proved as profitable to the cause of world communism as outright armed attack. As a result, internal security as much as direct aggression has become an urgent challenge. Bound by the United Nations Charter, the Pacific Charter and the Seto Treaty itself to uphold the principle of self-determination, Seto is constantly alert to anticipate and prepared to thwart any externally directed effort to seize or subvert any of the treaty area countries. Seto is the third link in a defensive chain which stretches round the world from Asia through the Middle East under the Baghdad Act through the NATO countries and Europe and through the United States across the Pacific to Asia. It is a natural and vital part of the free world's perimeter of collective security and it grows healthier and stronger with every passing day. Seto's defensive military structure rests on a firm foundation today. Now increasing emphasis is being placed on economic and cultural exchange. Increased cooperation in these areas will lead toward greater security, sounder economies and more political unity in the member nations. Seto in conception and practice represents a force to fulfill the fondest aspirations of all the peoples of Asia, of all the world. It is a force promoting freedom from economic want, a force defending liberty and the independence of free nations. Present communist strategy in Southeast Asia is to undermine non-communist governments by threat and subversion. In the three and a half years since Seto's formation the eight member nations have made long strides forward along the road to mutual security. Now this is Sergeant Stuart Queen, your host for the Big Picture. The Big Picture is an official television report for the armed forces and the American people produced by the Army Pictorial Center presented by the United States Army in cooperation with this station.


Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2016. Brought to you by Red Hat. Now here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Graceley. Welcome back, happy to welcome to the program the first time guest on theCUBE and fresh off the keynote, Sven Lohberg who is the open source lead, global open source lead for Accenture. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Great, so first time on the program, we're obviously quite familiar with Accenture, I think most of our audience is, but can you tell us a little bit about your background and your role at Accenture? Sure, absolutely, so thanks Stu. So what I do within Accenture, you mentioned open source, so part of our emerging technology practice and also then lead up open source. And so certainly those are very synergistic as we look to the future of what we're doing to develop new capabilities, incubating new emerging technologies and also then looking to where those sources of innovation are coming from. How that is open source based is really innovation is now seen as a driver of innovation. And so the role is really working within Accenture as well as externally to spread the word around open source and our involvement in communities as well as getting Accenture as a whole to use more open source, contribute to open source as we really kind of started to pivot around some of the new technologies that are largely open source based when you think of the big datas, you think of the web 2.0s, the analytics, all those are open source for the most part and driven by open source technologies versus some of the proprietary ones that maybe led some of the previous technology trends in the past. So obviously you've got the partnership with Red Hat here. Can you speak to though the kind of the contribution, the breadth and the depth of what Accenture does with open source? So absolutely, so you mentioned Red Hat, so yeah, we definitely have a number of open source alliances that we work with. Red Hat's certainly one of those strategic ones that we have, really how we do it. We combine some of our industry expertise with then open source as far as whether it be components or just some of the innovation that we're thinking about to build various industry assets that leverage open source as well as those industry expertise items. So whether it be around financial services or telecommunications, some of the things I talked about today with the keynote around Accenture Video Services or also our connected platform as a service as well as then some of the intelligent orchestration all driven by open source as well as now contributing a lot of those things to the community which is certainly a big aspect of kind of what I look to do. When you think about Accenture, you mentioned we are well known, very large and that's exciting when you start thinking about the 40,000 Java developers and other professionals that we have. What if we get five or 10% of those that start regularly contributing to a particular open source project? That could be quite powerful. A lot of the things that we do on clients or do internally, getting that more in the open, driving that transparency and the innovation and collaboration with our clients, that's what's exciting as far as about it and what we're looking to do with open source around our strategy as we gauge with the different partners that we have as far as the different alliances around Red Hat sort of being one of those that certainly is strategic. Do you have any, you talked about what if, is there a roadmap, is there any, how many people are actually contributing to open source or how you incent people inside Accenture? So I mean, kind of the journey that we've taken is, and it's not necessarily new, our contributions, it's just the scale and the pace of it. So it certainly contributed to Spring Batch almost well over a decade now as far as some of our early contributions that we've made and really what it is as far as how can we accelerate that of what we're doing within the community. So that's in the sense of what we've started to do around inner source, so that was something that we started about eight years ago now. So inner source was kind of introducing the concept of community driven development within the enterprise, getting people to use continuous integration, continuous delivery pipelines as part of the tools they're using but also then driving the culture aspect as well was important. That was something that we did, we now have over 3,000 projects internally. What we'd like to do as far as we now have our open source GitHub page, internal a lot of those things that were done internally now, let's now put those externally. So think about, if we had 3,000 internally, think about even if we had 10% of those right now being open source and what we've seen interesting is as we've opened them into the broader community like our open DevOps platform for example, completely open source based around just that DevOps and CI CD aspects of it and using things like OpenShift or using things like containerization technologies as well as we've seen an increase internally as far as to the contribution of those projects. So some of these projects have been around for two or three years internally but now if we've open sourced them we've got a whole new group of people within Accenture that are excited about contributing to those projects which is at first somewhat counterintuitive we've now made it visible, maybe that's scary but what we're seeing is particularly when we think about Accenture, there's a lot of millennials and that's what they crave. They want to be kind of part of communities, they want a bit of the external recognition. We also do a bit of gamification around it as well. So we try to reward then people that are doing some of the top contributions to those different projects and also giving greater kind of points then to people that create new projects which is kind of how we're looking to accelerate it and translate that to what we were doing internally as well as externally. Then also kind of at an enterprise level working with some more folks within our products and platform group what's now previously was called Accenture Software which is okay, how can we take a lot of those things that were previously proprietary or maybe even used open source but they were necessarily kind of highlighted in that sense but a lot of them are now becoming platforms, SaaS solutions, so it's all about how can they use more open source. Now there's a number of reasons they're doing that certainly because of a cost aspect to get the price per use down but also because a lot of the innovation they're seeing is simplifying some of their stack as well where in some cases they may have had three or four different proprietary tools and now they can replace them with an end-to-end solution that's open source based. Yeah Accenture works with some of the largest companies in the world, almost every industry in the world. What's the pulse that you're hearing from customers in terms of not only open source but just wanting to use innovative new technologies, wanting to sort of change their business models. What are you hearing from them and what are the types of things that you're hearing from them that are driving your open source initiatives? So I mean certainly a lot of things that I take time talking with clients about is kind of their next generation application architectures and so this is really an opportunity for them to re-evaluate kind of their strategy, their people strategy where maybe before they were saying hey we're gonna have really specialization in what our folks do as well as our expectations of some of the partners that we work with like Accenture and some of those right at driving so we need now more full stack developers, somebody that can be holistic, that can work within smaller teams which means they need to have a greater tool set to do some of those implementations and they're also seeing it frankly as an opportunity to take some of those emerging technologies and kind of insource them in the sense of build those capabilities themselves but then they also get to an inflection point where they now need someone like Accenture to be part of what some of the new reference implementations they're building and then scale them out and certainly that's where we work with them extensively certainly some of the initial implementations but then also when they need to scale so certainly those are some trends that we're seeing around as clients and look at that and certainly the open source angle there is of course a lot of what they're then looking to do is a next generation application architectures leveraging open source which also triggers a couple other behaviors so it's a different way of doing talent acquisition so for example before maybe it'd been a proprietary stack that they were using and they needed to kind of attract some of the millennials and how do they do that? Certainly open source is a big magnet for that how they can bring in talent but also then they understand that that technology that the millennials are working on is coming from an open source community and that they may not necessarily be around for 10, 15, 20 years anymore they're more likely to just be there for a couple years and so it's the expectation how can they still attract those but then the interesting thing is the aspect that they'll also then leave but then if they're working on some of those projects they'll also continue to contribute which is an interesting aspect well now you're actually still getting benefit and kind of the relationships that you've built within those communities after they're no longer employees which is certainly kind of an interesting twist and kind of the benefit of them also being part of communities which also means okay it's going back to the help of the communities and drawing innovation that the importance of engagement and participation in those which is then kind of you're asking what is now clients think of Forest Accenture which is what we're seeing also is that there's an expectation that you're not just a user of a particular open source component or project to have expertise that means you're involved in those communities, you're contributing so it's very common now to say okay well what are you contributing to this particular community if you say you're going to bid on this particular piece of work and that's certainly an important aspect as well because now it really matters to them certainly whether you have the expertise but also are you also giving to that community that now I'm dependent on as far as as a client so those are a couple of different things that we're seeing as far as clients use more open source and then their expectations around what we're doing and other partners are doing grows as well. So it sounds like pretty radical change around intellectual property ownership human assets, human capital, keeping them around thinking about them as a community as opposed to individuals maybe thinking about longevity of projects and so forth all that sounds like it's radically changing because of open source, because of the new millennial generation coming in, different workforce, different expectations I would think. That's right Brian, exactly so and that certainly will continue to do plenty of proprietary development and frankly a lot of the proprietary product companies today they're recognizing that as well they're adopting open source and so they're also going to pivot a bit as well certainly and so there is a bit of a balance there but absolutely, definitely seeing a lot of disruption really just what we coach our clients and try to do ourselves is we'd like to be the ones disrupting versus being the one disrupted and that's really what, having that agility and the ability to change is really going to be what's keeping us as well as our clients as high performers in the market. Sven so in your keynote just earlier you announced increased participation and increased support for the Linux Foundation. Can you explain why Accenture's doing this and what's important about it? Yeah absolutely good question, good comment as far as so we did that in combination a little bit of with our cyber security lab that we just launched in Tel Aviv in Israel which is our seventh lab which is really about kind of harnessing some of the R&D and the innovation that we're doing in this case around some of the cyber security things that are going around and obviously the importance of that to our clients. So certainly there was the aspect of what could we then from an innovation perspective bring but also it was the ideas that we particularly for in this case the core infrastructure initiative as part of the Linux Foundation was that there was an underlying need and importance to be involved not just in some of the kind of more sexy kind of cyber security innovations but also recognize that we need to be contributing and giving back to some of the underlying technologies really that sometimes get forgotten about some things like as far as how to keep time on the internet the network time protocol things or open SSL which people only start caring about when there's a vulnerability identified and then everyone cares about it but what happens over the time when it's not in the news which is hopefully the greater portion of that and so the core infrastructure initiative was a way that we could be contributing and kind of building that recognition internally as well as externally the importance of that and also somewhat set of presidents so in this case the core initiative is really led by a lot of the traditional kind of technology companies from a software perspective the Cisco and others that okay that's part of their core business right as far as network and aspects but what about the system integrators as well so that was what we were setting the tone there saying hey as a global system integrator this is important to us it's important to our clients really as the broader ecosystem and so we wanted to kind of set the tone there as kind of a leader in that space hoping then that others will follow. All right Sven I want to give you the last word here as people come out of Red Hat Summit where does Accenture fit into the discussion what are some of the top conversations you're having that you'd want the broad audience to understand about? So certainly there's been a lot of buzz so the summit's been a fantastic event this year certainly lots of collaboration which is what you would expect from a group of open source community participants getting together and doing certainly what we're seeing around our connected platform as a service a lot of talk certainly around IoT a lot of great demos this week so we're seeing a lot of buzz around that people are certainly resonating with some of the things that we've done in the industry space around IoT and looking to see how can we partner with them bringing it to things like our liquid studio in Redwood City where we can kind of innovate and do early prototypes for them and bring it to market faster so those are some of the things that we're excited about as we move forward with open source as well as our clients as we both kind of take that journey as you're pointing out that it's really kind of a revolution of types as it becomes a very disruptive but also beneficial change that's going on within the marketplace. All right, well, Svenloberg talking about communities welcome to the CUBE alumni community also thanks for giving us the updates on Accenture we'll be back with more coverage from Red Hat Summit 2016 here in San Francisco you're watching the CUBE.


Congress and the White House appear nowhere close to a new deal. More than 52 million Americans filing for unemployment since March and roughly 20 million now facing possible evictions. Extraction has been negligent. We've told them over and then over again emails are not enough. We have a responsibility to learn from this moment and realize that we've got to guarantee everybody in this country health care and if we don't we will continue to be vulnerable to these kinds of massive public health crises. We need an economic relief directly to the people regardless of our status right now. Why should governments be paying out vast sums of public money to prop up an industry which is unsustainable, which is contributing massively to climate change? We're now looking at possibility of hours in voting. There is something fundamentally broken and if we are to have a democracy we need to make sure that people have access and effective and efficient systems to be able to vote. As we know those communities that have already been struggling due to systemic racism, the scourge of inequality, unequal access to health care and so on are being hit much harder due to that existing structural inequality. Somehow this this pipeline can be building in the middle of this world ride pandemic that's going on. The Green New Deal is an economic stimulus. If we need an economic stimulus let's have an economic stimulus but instead of bailing out the companies at the heart of the climate crisis why wouldn't we stimulate the parts of our economy that will bring us to real safety?


We can also have non-homogeneous systems of differential equations. How do we solve those? Good question. It's helpful to introduce something called the fundamental matrix. Suppose a differential equation has a solution that can be written as a linear combination of vectors multiplied by some exponential function. The solution can be represented in terms of the fundamental matrix C, where C is equal to a matrix whose columns are the individual vectors. And so our solution, X, is going to be C times a column vector of the constants. So for example, let's find the fundamental matrix for the system derivative is equal to 3122 times X. So first we find the eigenvalues and the eigenvectors of the coefficient matrix, which means we could write down the general solution. Now while we ordinarily write the general solution in this form, if we write the general solution in matrix form we get, and if we think about this as the product of a matrix of constants times the fundamental matrix, we can recover the fundamental matrix. So remember in matrix multiplication, first row times first and only column gives us the first entry of the product. Since we want to get minus C1e to the t plus C2e to the 4t, that means our first row must be minus e to the t e to the 4t. Similarly, our second row times our column has to give us 2C1e to the t plus C2e to the 4t. And that means the second row must be, which gives us our fundamental matrix. So now we can talk about non-homogeneous equations. Suppose dx equals ax has solution cc, where c is a column vector of constants. Then dx equals ax plus g of t might have a solution cc of t, where c of t is a column vector of functions of t. Now all we have to do is figure out what c of t is. Now let's jump right in and try to solve this non-homogeneous system. Now we've already determined that the homogeneous system has solution. So we'll use variation of parameters and we'll suppose that we have a solution of the form almost the same thing, but instead of constants c1 and c2, we'll have functions of t, c1 and c2. So our differential equation requires us to find the derivative of x. Now since x is a product of two matrices, then to find the derivative of a product, we can apply the product rule from calculus. You should probably prove that the product rule actually works here, but assuming that it does, we find that dx is... Now this is supposed to be equal to this product and sum. So we can find that. And since they're supposed to be equal, we can put them equal to each other. And notice we have this product of matrices appearing on both sides of the equation. So we can drop that product out, leaving us with... which tells us something about c1 prime and c2 prime. Well remember this corresponds to a system of linear equations. So let's write down what that system actually is. We can solve it. Here we might notice that we have an e to the 4t, c2, prime of t in both equations. So if we multiply the first equation by minus one and add, then solve for c1 prime. And since we have c1 prime, we can integrate to find c1 itself. Similarly, we can take our two equations, and if we multiply our top equation by two and add, we'll eliminate the c1t prime. Solving for c2 prime of t gives us... and since we know c2 prime, we can integrate to find c2, which tells us what c2 of t is. And so that gives us our solution.


The federal government has embarked on the second phase of its empowerment program under the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development. The EU State Commissioner for Humanitarian Affairs Ibrahim Rabi, who represented the minister in OSS, the loan scheme is designed to provide financial inclusion and give credit access to help petty traders in their businesses and farmers in the state. According to hard money given to the beneficiaries of the empowerment program, is a loan and not a grant and must be repaid. In relation to exercise for beneficiaries of GIP, that is a government enterprise empowerment program, one of the arms of the NC program, operated under the federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and the way in the state, Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, and the program manager, who just flagged off the industrial size of the EU. We got the first phase last month and then today we are flagging off the second phase of the industrial size for the beneficiaries of market money, trader money and the farmers' money. We have invited all the potential beneficiaries to come over here for their enumeration. Since they are enumerated, the assets bank will begin to give them their payment of the loan because the government enterprise empowerment program entails, it has three streams. It entails the trader money, the farmer money and the market money. Now, my position actually is to monitor the enumeration process and then when the money is disposed, we actually follow up on these beneficiaries, what they do with this money? Do they actually use the money or do they just pocket the money? Because the government wants to know, you know there is no job anywhere and then we empower them to create job opportunities for them and for all that. So when you are giving the money, we advise to make use of the money. You don't just eat the money and just go with it.


You might be forgiven for thinking that I'm a pessimist, that the Low Technology Institute's blog, podcast, publications, and presentation often focus on the coming collapse when fossil fuels are less abundant, that we are giddily awaiting the crash of our energy-intensive way of life, and that we cheer on each figurative piece of straw put on the camel's back as the inevitable break approaches. But at heart, we're optimists, and a future that has less energy available doesn't have to be worse, it just has to be different. We argue that the sooner we embrace this future, the sooner that we can create a more sustainable, resilient, and local life, the better. And we're not alone in this way of thinking. This is the Lotech Podcast. Hello and welcome, I'm Scott Johnson from the Lotech Technology Institute, your host for podcast number 49 on June 10th, 2022, coming to you out of the, usually out of the Lotech Institute's gardens in Cooksville, Wisconsin. But today it's raining. Thank you for joining us. I think we are glad to share the first half of a longer interview I gave to the Dumer Optimism Podcast. We'll also have Institute updates. And don't forget to follow us on Twitter, our handle is low underscore techno. Like us on Facebook, find us on Instagram, subscribe to us on YouTube, and check out our website, lowtechinstitute.org. There you can find both of our podcasts, as well as information about joining and supporting the Institute and its research. Also some podcast distributors put ads on podcasts, and unless you hear me doing the ad, someone else is making money on that advertising. And while all of our podcast videos and other information are given freely, they do take resources to make. And if you're in a position to help support our work and be part of this community, please consider becoming a monthly supporter for as little as $3 a month. Through our Patreon page, patreon.com slash lowtechinstitute. Thanks to Ingrid S. for joining us in our last podcast. If you'd like to sponsor an episode directly, please get in touch with us through our website, lowtechinstitute.org. This episode is brought to you by Sunshine. We know you have a choice of electromagnetic radiation, and we hope you consider the light coming from the G-type main sequence star at the center of our solar system. While nuclear power meltdowns and distant stars might claim to offer better radiation, wouldn't you rather stick to the source that supported life on Earth for over 3.5 billion years? Warning, solar radiation, too high an amount may cause skin cancer. Do not touch the sun. Do not look at the sun. Do not think about the sun expanding into a red dwarf in 5 billion years and gulfing Mercury and Venus and rendering the Earth into a blasted hellscape. Visit lowtechinstitute.org slash about slash support to sponsor an episode. Today we'll be listening in on an interview I had with Dr. Ashley Colby and John Kearns on the Doomer Optimism Podcast. Their podcast is quote, dedicated to discovering regenerative past forward highlighting the people working for a better world and connecting seekers to doers and quote. They put out two episodes a week and while you can find all their offerings at doomeroptimism.com, the podcast is available under the same name on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, Google and others. They've drawn from a broad swath of people who are actively working towards a more sustainable and resilient future and their message will resonate with anyone listening to the lowtech podcast. Okay, let's get right into it. Welcome everybody to a new episode of the Doomer Optimism Podcast. Today Ashley and I are talking with Scott Johnson who is the founder and director of the Low Technology Institute. Scott, why don't you introduce yourself, give us a little bit of your back story and how you came to find the logic and the kind of stuff that you guys work on. Sure. So, well, I guess in the beginning I started in northern Minnesota that's where I'm kind of lived all over through an exchange year abroad and in Germany and then came back into college in Boston and then New Orleans for grad school and that was all archaeology. I'm an archaeologist by training and I finished my PhD in anthropology which is kind of the umbrella for archaeology and a couple other social sciences and I was teaching and just was on the adjunct treadmill which I'm sure we don't need to get into today. And I just kind of started thinking about society in general, large scale, rise and fall of ancient civilizations and I was writing a book at the time called Why Ancient Civilizations Failed which was not my title. I wanted to call it hubris which is something we can talk about if you want but basically my idea was that societies become so enamored of themselves that they stop paying attention to changing environmental factors. I don't just mean climate environment, I mean things around them, they're surroundings and then when they stop paying attention to their surroundings things change and then they collapse because they think, oh, we've farmed this way for a thousand years and it's worked so why would we change, right? And then, of course, being the all saying I have sour on myself, I looked at these ancient civilizations, bad word, I know complex societies and then I looked at our own and I thought, well, we're kind of addicted to fossil fuels and we haven't planned for the end of those and I kind of got depressed and found places like the Dark Mountain Project and others who were kind of on the same page and eventually I said, okay, enough of this academic run around, I'm going to start doing something where I can do hands on research projects and center them around small scale DIY solutions to a lot of how we're going to live after fossil fuels are no longer around. So there's, I guess, kind of the doomer part, my depression about where we're going and the optimism part about, hey, there are things you can do right now that not only make you more resilient in a future without fossil fuels but also today when prices go up, it's like, okay, grocery store prices are going up. I don't care because we grow a lot of our own food and it's not like we have a lot of land to do it on. You can grow a lot of your own food in your own space. So stuff like that, that's kind of what we're all about. We're a 501c3 nonprofit and we have a research wing and makes it sound very grand, a research wing that does research on everything from growing potatoes, solar hot water and breeding bees and growing food, a lot of it's food related. And then we have an education wing where we have classes on a lot of the topics we cover. Next year we hope to do a whole series on timber framing as we build a building for our institute, things like that. So we're trying to do a lot of stuff, hands on local small scale stuff. That's basically what we're all about. Well, that's a great sort of 30,000 foot view. Super interesting stuff going on. I want to mention the low tech institute website, low tech institute, great website. I've been exploring it. I think a person could easily spend a month looking through all the resources you got on there. You've got videos, you've got podcasts, you've got a lot of how-to stuff, you've got descriptions of the projects that you've worked on, you've got white papers and other sort of philosophical materials and stuff. So I definitely encourage everybody to go see lowtechinstitute.org and check out the stuff you got. I want to step through things a little bit slower and maybe ask you questions about your process and things that were formative for you. So you did your PhD in archaeology and anthropology and you worked a lot with Mayan communities in Mesoamerica, Latin America. So could you give like a little description of the kind of stuff that you were doing with those communities and maybe some salient experiences that you had, what you learned working with those communities and how it's affected your past? So what you guys were talking about on a previous episode actually resonated with me because I know you've had lots of people on who have worked in different parts of the, I guess you'd call it less industrialized part of the world, which is I think a better phrasing than say more or less developed because as soon as development is required. Yeah, so I lived in Guatemala for a while. I also lived most of my time working in the field was in Mexico in a small village just south of Chichen Itza, which is many people know. I was 15 minutes south of there, but kind of a world away because 15 minutes away was Chichen Itza where they had the buses coming in with thousands of tourists every day and very first world sort of experience. And then I was 15 minutes away, but never went to town to get a cell phone signal. I had to climb up the tallest tree on the tallest pyramid and then I could call home and so, you know, so still connected but barely. And so, you know, we had like one outlet in our in the house we lived in. And so this was an experience that that touched me a lot because people have been living in so many different ways across the ancient world. And today that it makes me so disappointed that sometimes we get such a narrow view of what it is to live a good life and I don't want to romanticize living the way that they did or that they do in rural parts of Mexico because there are, you know, access to health care and over influx of process sugars and processed foods nowadays has given rise to high diabetes and a lot of health conditions. So that and education and many, many I could list, right? There's there's a lot of difficulty. So I don't mean to romanticize it. But the fact that, you know, if if something terrible catastrophic were to happen to World Trade, I think they would continue to live a lot more comfortably than many of us would. And that made me happy and sad, I guess. But I don't know. I think about I think about it and I try and draw ideas from them and then from not only only them, but across the world both today and in the past and and take those ideas and analyze them in a bit of a more scientifically rigorous way with a control and an experimental plots of different vegetables or different plants and growing or methods I'm using to kind of get a comparison. There's a lot of people in the alternative agriculture or alternative energy or alternative XYZ community. They'll say, oh, this is a great idea. I'm going to try it. They try it. There's no control. So you don't know if it's if it's doing better than than than it would otherwise. So so yeah, I try I try and draw from them and and draw from that type of idea.  And for example, we're on Zoom right now. And I don't think anyone listening on a podcast would be able to listen to two of these ideas if we didn't have the communication infrastructure that we do. So there are some things that I think are important to try and preserve as we move in transition into this brave new world that's coming at us, whether we like it or not, whereas some things that I think we can jettison pretty easily. So people hear that you're an archaeologist and that you're living and working in the Yucatan. They're going to think that you're maybe going around digging up bones and old pyramid sites and stuff like that. So when you're there working with the communities there, what running around digging up bones and stuff? Or were you studying contemporary practices? Are you studying ancient practices or what were you focused on? Sure. So for me, at least for my dissertation, which has the actual topic of my dissertation had only in a very broad sense, anything to do with what I'm doing today. I was looking at a complex political change in the past. And so, yes, I was going around every day. We walked two kilometers out to the site from the village I was staying in of about 300 people who grew up speaking my as a primary language and then learned Spanish in school. And so we'd walk out to the site every day and we would first, we had to survey, so we had to cut straight lines to the forest and use survey equipment and identify where all the structures were and the topography of the land to kind of recreate what this this little tiny village looked like. It was about the same size of the village we lived in now. And then the next year we did surface collections and excavations to get pottery. We were primarily focused on pottery because pottery sequence changes over time, just like, you know, if you were digging through a trash bin or a trash pit from the last century, you'd see different coke bottles because coke bottles change over time and you could then date which each layer was, right? So we basically were doing that with pottery. That was a thousand years old. And what we were looking at with all this, you know, just little mundane bits of everyday pottery that, you know, John Q. Maya just kind of threw out when it broke was actually a really interesting change in that for four, five, six hundred years, there was a local large scale, more or less sociopolitical control or regime. And then after what's called the Maya collapse, which interestingly affected two interesting points in the Maya collapse, which some people like to talk about. Number one collapse is kind of a loaded word because the thing that collapsed were the upper levels of societies, the people that were building the large pyramids, the rulers, the the people that were not subsistence farmers. Subsistence farmers largely just scattered into the forest and picked up and continued living. So there was a lot of resilience and it affected 10 percent of the population a lot. So saying it was a collapse is a little disingenuous. And number two, it happened more in the southern area. That was more dependent on rainfall, where I worked just practically a desert. It was a scrub. I forget the exact couple designation of it, but it was a scrub forest near a desert. It was it was pretty it was kind of like Texas. It was pretty hot, dry limestone, no water stayed on the surface, very little soil. Anyway, so these people weathered the drought really well because they already had drought resilient strategies. So they just kind of kept chugging along. And then what happened to them was a maritime empire that Chichen Itza represents came in and was an intrusion. And then they so I was looking at this little village that was equidistant between almost equidistant between Chichen Itza and the old capital. And I wanted to see how did this so-called massive shift from one regime to another manifest itself on the local level for small everyday people. And it didn't really. I mean, they just paid tribute to someone else. So they didn't care. I mean, as far as I could tell, very little change. So a lot of times when we think of these big catastrophic world ending changes, a lot of that doesn't affect the little people. Now, this was at a time when people were subsistence farmers and could go out into the landscape and create their own living, which is kind of different than most of us today. You know, maybe present company excluded, but they're there for the majority of population a disruption of that level would be catastrophic to their daily way of life. And so that in addition to other things, kind of pushed me to say, OK, well, can we build this resilience into our lives now, knowing that we do have this change coming, you know, make ourselves more resilient and more self self-sufficient also is a word I'm trying to get away for, maybe locally, locally resilient or locally sufficient rather than self-sufficient. Because I think in America, we all like to be think we could be self-sufficient. But nobody's self-sufficient unless you are able to get or out of the ground and become a blacksmith and do all these things. You are not self-sufficient. Like, you know, yeah, and do that with everything. You are not self-sufficient.  Yeah, even as a rugged individualist out on the frontier. Yes. OK. This is so good. I can totally see the straight line between your research and the Lotech Institute, because it's basically like in the in the situation where there's like complex systems collapse, people can still thrive if they're able to sort of like meet their needs on like a local or community or a bio-rational level. So it's so it very much ties in with all the a lot of the stuff we talk about is just I think a lot of people who have studied history or lived in the developing world think this similar or less industrialized world. Think in a similar way, which is like, you know, I think realizing how precarious our lives are. Those of us who don't have these skills and have very little ability to provide for our own basic needs. And so like preparing for that in advance is smarter than not doing it. This is there's so much overlap, too, with my experience and maybe Josh's experience, too. It might be interesting.  But I do think there is something to spending time outside of the developed world, like the hyper industrial world to give you a set of perspective, like, you know, a perspective about how other people live, how, how it's pretty accessible to live sustainably and with low resource input on a community level. And it's you realize, like, you don't need a ton of resources to get by, to eat, to have warm water, a place of warm and dry place to sleep. I I traveled to Guatemala and had this similar kind of insight at the Pyramid Tikal. Do you know that one? And just like just seeing like, yeah, there was this complex civilization and, and, you know, it it it sort of went away. But, you know, like, we persist throughout time. So, OK, one thing that a lot of people who are, I think, thinking in this type of way, had this kind of set of experience interested in in complex societies of the past are like trying to figure out what can we draw from the past? What can we draw from anthropology? The study of past civilizations, like what's relevant for us? And what's what should we be modeling? But obviously, like in the modern context. And so one thing that has been coming up a bunch recently is and this would be great to get your opinion on before we get into, like, the more modern work that you're the work you're doing at LTI. But is are there like would you call what the the the Mayan civilization or the Mayan society you were studying? Would you call that a civilization or not? And I there was some debate recently on Twitter about whether or not a civilization, if once it gets to the point where it's a civilization, it's necessarily unsustainable. And I like I feel like there are lots of very extremely varied examples of complex societies in the past. You might call them civilizations that lasted like very long, very like thousands of years with decent amount of complexity.  These kinds of major changes. So I'm wondering like how do you feel like it's important to make this distinction like civilizations are unsustainable? And because then that has implications for us, right? Because I get a little frustrated sometimes where people are like any amount of complex organization among humans is going to be unsustainable. And then it's like, well, where does that leave us?  You know, and I think it's a little bit like this fetishizing indigeneity of the past and stuff like that in it too. So I don't know, I've been curious to hear your thoughts since you're trained in this area. Sure. So I'm just taking notes because there's like seven complex questions. Yeah, we could. So first of all, yeah, so OK, so civilization. So the term itself, civilization, it's in the title of my book. But like I said, that's not my choice because civilization has become at least an anthropology, a dirty word, because you may already know your listeners may already know that civilization comes from a tripartite division from anthropology and like 150 years ago when there was a lot of European colonialism and they put everybody in the world into three categories. You're either a savage, a barbarian or civilized, which is really not. We don't want to use those terms anymore, although civilization has stuck around and become really. Really really difficult to shake. So we so that word is still here for better or worse. I try not to use it. Like I said, I prefer the term complex societies or large scale complex societies. And that just refers to when you have a lot of people living together, it becomes incredibly complex because it's almost like an exponential growth of complexity, the more people you have grouped together closely and communicating. And so to say, for example, we talk about maybe a service, services divisions, band, tribe, chiefdom, state as ways to talk about how many people are living together. And the important thing, the important difference is from the savage, barbarian civilization idea was there was an arrow. Everybody started out in the savagery and then you moved to barbarism and then you moved to civilization. So you, a lot of the colonialism was to try and pull these quote unquote, I apologize for using this word, but this is, I'm just historically speaking, they said, we are going to these places of savagery and trying to bring them into civilization. So that's again, why we don't use that word. That's the language of the past. Yeah, so it's really problematic. I guess if you want to be, yeah, historical about it. Anyway, so band, tribe, chiefdom, the important difference there is there is no presumed movement from band to tribe, from tribe to chiefdom from chiefdom to state. That's sometime how it progresses, but that doesn't have a value judgment on it. State isn't necessarily better than a band. Bands are egalitarian. Bands move across the landscape. They're largely nomadic hunter-gatherers. Bands have, people in bands have long life spans. They have really good health because they're not living in the same place polluting that one environment. They're moving around. They're eating a very diet. They actually bands. When you move to a tribe or chiefdom, those are usually agricultural. And when you move from a band to sedentary agricultural lifestyle, you see shorter stature, which is kind of an indication of poor nutrition, really, because it's only in the last 50 years that we have attained the height of average hunter-gatherers before agriculture because we have such a robust industrial food production system right now. So 50 years before that, everyone was a lot shorter. Going back 10,000 years because they were eating monocrop wheat and things like that. So yeah, we're trying to get away from that value judgment. So yeah, so that's civilization. That's why I try and use the term complex. So my question is then, once you get to chiefdom state level, is it necessarily unsustainable? At that level? No. No, but it's easier to be. Okay, that makes sense. When you have, so I like to say, for example, because my big bugaboo is fossil fuels. I say that fossil fuels kind of hypercharge all the best and the worst about us, right? They help us produce tons of food, but they also help us destroy the environment at an increased rate. One person with an excavator could cause so much soil damage and erosion that they could completely destroy a wetland ecosystem easily. A single person, right? I mean, that's only possible because of fossil fuels. It would be hard to do that with a shovel possible, but it would be a lot more dedicated. Anyway, and similarly with hundreds of four thousands of people working together in pre-industrial societies, you know, canalization is a big one. Deforestation is a big one. These are ways that, you know, more people living in a concentrated area, it's a lot easier for them to destroy their environment or change their conditions in a way that make it unsustainable in the long run. That doesn't mean it can't be sustainable. And a lot of people like to romanticize, for example, Native Americans, First Nations societies here. And they forget that when Europeans encountered Native Americans in many places, it was right after a plague had killed off anywhere from 15 to 90% of the population. And so you had a very diminished population living with the infrastructure and the large resources of a much larger society. And the same thing happened in Europe after the Bubonic plague. Because land is finite. As the population increases, there is less resources, or less land and less resources available for each individual person. And so after the Bubonic plague wiped out a third of Europeans, you know, suddenly there's extra land for growing food, there's extra housing, there's all this extra availability because all of the dead people don't need it anymore. And so people actually had a boom, an economic boom, and a high quality of life after all these people died off. And so it's easy to romanticize. And I'm not saying that we can't learn a lot of really good lessons from Native American agriculture and even social organization. You know, my favorite anecdote was that a lot of Native societies would divide property rights were matrilineal, they passed through the mothers to their daughters, and then a lot of the other societal organizations were patrilineal, they passed through men. And so women on the land, men provided a lot of labor. And so it was kind of a, there had to be more mutual respect, right, between the two, rather than men owning a lot of the land and providing a lot of the labor. And then, yeah, it's easier to be less egalitarian. And so sometimes when the Europeans would meet, they'd want to talk to the, you know, whoever was ruling that village. And they would think that the woman was acting as a translator for her husband when she was actually in charge. And they kept talking to the man and he'd be like, well, ask my wife. And there's a lot of cultural confusion, let alone language confusion. So there's a lot of really useful things. And I don't mean to disregard that, but yeah, it's important to keep everything in perspective. So can large scale civilizations be sustainable? Yes, they can, but they have to be very self-reflective. And I feel like as societies become more powerful, they become less self-reflective in a realistic way. And they feel that they have the answers. This is how it works. And if we don't, and we don't need to change, we can change the world around us. And I feel like this really feeds on to our technophilia.  And, you know, the anthropologist James C. Scott has the idea of high modernism. And this is a robust, almost religious belief in technology going to save us. And I have sympathy for this. I have family members who think we're going to innovate our way out of this. And I say, okay, maybe, but until that happens, I'm going to plan for things that I know work, like growing lots of potatoes, you know, like growing wheat, growing things locally doing, being locally self-sufficient. That's what I'm going to focus on until we have, you know, carbon capture that is energy neutral and all of these wonderful things that people are trying to work on it. You know, everybody has an electric car that doesn't have a really terrible supply chain for its lithium batteries and all of these things. That's what it's going to be, right? No. I can't predict the future, but yeah, I'll work. I'll focus on things that have a proven track record and make them better and more obtainable rather than, you know, refocusing on something new that's going to save us because the new has gotten us into this problem. Right. Yeah, I'd like to, if it's cool, I'd like to jump in. If you want to hear the rest of the interview, find the Doomer Optimism podcast on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Google, and other venues. Have a look through their back catalog for other great interviews. And if you want advanced access to their episodes, you can also support them on Patreon. And now for a brief recap of the research we have going on around the Institute. And unfortunately, COVID swept through my family, which lives here at the Institute. First, my partner got what seemed like a cold with congestion and fatigue. She quarantined after testing positive, but the next day my son was feverish and also positive and joined her in quarantine. Two days later, my infant daughter and I also tested positive. So on the bright side, we all got to quarantine together. Thankfully, all of our symptoms were mild, but with caring for people in quarantine and the usual childcare and my own illness, we've mostly been shut down for the last two weeks. I point this out not to complain, but to highlight the type of redundancy and resiliency we try and build into our day-to-day lives. By having food on hand and other necessities available, a two-week illness is easy to weather. We didn't have to have emergency shopping trips done for us by our neighbors. We just had to think about how to keep ourselves healthy. We're working on a systematic way for folks to approach building resiliency and local subsistence into their lives. The beta version of this site is up, which you can find at lowtechinstitute.org slash transition, and we really welcome your feedback. That's it for the week. The LowTech podcast is put out by the Low Technology Institute. The show is hosted and co-produced by me, Scott Johnson. It's also co-produced and edited by Hina Suzuki. This episode was recorded in the Low Technology Institute. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, YouTube, and elsewhere. We hope you've enjoyed this free podcast. If you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do, please consider going to patreon.com slash lowtechinstitute and signing up. Thank you to our Forrester and Land Steward level members, Marilyn, Skirpon, and the Hambuses for their support. The Low Technology Institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members, grants, and underwriting. You can find out more information about the Low Technology Institute, membership, and underwriting at lowtechinstitute.org. Find us on social media and reach me directly, Scott, at lowtechinstitute.org. Our intro music was high on lounging off the self-titled album by Wax Lyricist. That song is under the Creative Commons license, and this podcast is under the Creative Commons attribution and share-like license, meaning you're free to use it and share it as long as you give us credit. Thanks and take care.


For close to a decade, I've used up to 700 sensors, devices, and applications to track, analyze, and even optimize my life. What could you learn about yourself if you knew as much about your life as the internet? Let's start with streaming music, like Spotify. Sometimes the music or entertainment we listen to while we work is holding us back. Consider listening to music you haven't heard before to get certain jobs done. You'll be amazed how easy it is to focus. Send only the number of emails you want to receive yourself. You get better by taking steps, not counting them. Beware of apps or devices that shame you into meeting a number. Leave notes for your family in the cloud. By leaving notes and tips at locations, you can carve your love into digital trees around the world. By looking at the data of my life in social media, entertainment, and opinion, I was able to learn how I was being affected, but more importantly, how technology was shaping my mood.  You need to learn to love your selfie.