10 years ago, George Monbiot wanted us to accept nuclear power. Now he wants us to accept genetically modified food. What's going on here? The answer is the environment movement's takeover by eco-modernists, and the way that social media influencers are now being used to sell everything, from business plans to entire ideologies. Now, I'm very sorry, but this is an unnecessarily long video. It's a deep dive into the role green pundits have in the ecological debate. It examines two issues that, try as I might over many weeks. I just couldn't separate. Firstly, there's the rise of multi-level marketing, the use of social media influencers to sell not only products, but also ideas and ideologies via the internet. As legacy media, traditional newspapers and broadcast TV decline, so advertisers and think tanks are shifting towards the use of social media influencers and micro-targeted online content to push your lobby for their particular business plan. Secondly, the environment debate in Britain is maintained by a few unaccountable figures elevated to the role of eco gatekeepers, which is why the ecological debate fails to make any real progress. That's not only shutting down alternative viewpoints, but as influencers, these people are being manipulated to push questionable viewpoints on the ecological crisis. We should be holding the political establishment's feet to the wildfire on ecological issues. Instead, a handful of reformers, promoting schemes or proposals which don't radically upend the ideological landscape, are given preferential access to the public debate. To pedal, multi-level marketing style, demonstrate wrong ideas about how to solve the ecological crisis. How do we hold these media-constructed pundits who claim to represent our interests to account? It's all about the evidence. To be clear, this isn't just about George Monbiot specifically, by its nature, this is also a discussion about the overwhelming class divide in the English environmental movement, since it's the London-centric English media and campaign groups which dominate this space. As a Guardian columnist, George Monbiot essentially states opinion, not facts, and George is not alone. I could equally cite journalists such as David Shuckman, highly ideological shows such as Countryfile, industry-backed pundits like Mark Linus, or green entrepreneurs such as Dale Vince. As these figures overwhelmingly embody the affluent middle-class values of the establishment, that debate not only downplays the trends which are the result of that lifestyle, but also fails to connect the people who stand to benefit the most in this debate, the average person living within the increasingly precarious UK economy. Instead, what passes to radicalism in English environmentalism are groups like Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil, but these groups are not radical. They are once again dominated by the middle class, and their metropolitan focus alienates them from the rest of Britain. Therein, just like the media's green pundits, the groups considered to be radicals in the public debate are statist, unwilling to look beyond the ideology, structures, and lifestyle created by Western affluence and consumption. They cannot encompass, in terms of its original meaning of, from the roots, any truly radical solution to the ecological crisis. Right now, there are subtle changes in green lobbying taking place, driven by changes in the media and advertising, linked to the manipulation of the public debate by social influencers, primarily working through social media and paid for content rather than the traditional legacy media. In the 1990s, I was an elected director of Friends of the Earth at an auspicious moment. Green had gone mainstream, and the pressure was to drop any hair-shirtered ideas for ecological change, not only to ride that media machine to get coverage, but also to soak up the money sloshing around from government and corporate interests desperate to greenwash their image. This position was openly articulated by Jonathan Parrott, one of those most directly responsible for rejecting radical thinking from first-degree party, then Friends of the Earth. In his 2005 book, Capitalism as if the world matters, he states, incremental change is the name of the game, not transformation, and that, of course, means that the emerging solutions have to be made to work within the embrace of capitalism. Like it or not, capitalism is now the only economic game in town. For fear, perhaps of arriving at a different conclusion, there is an unspoken and largely untested assumption that there need be no fundamental contradiction between sustainable development and capitalism. Three decades on, and that approach has clearly failed, and arguably has diluted the movement's influence within the noise created around these issues. More recently, though, this process has shifted reflecting the economic pressures on the legacy media, driven by the new online social influencer multi-level marketing machine. As green issues have matured against the background noise of the ecological crisis, and as government in action has shifted towards half-hearted targets, quotas, and especially subsidies, the pressure for environmentalists to promote certain issues has shifted from one of making change to promoting a business plan. In part the result of neoliberal values infiltrating all levels of society, green ideas have ceased to be an advocacy for political action. Instead, they advocate for one infrastructure plan or another, which seeks to green the modern lifestyle without changing it. As regulation, let alone limits or prohibition, becomes a dirty word in the skewed to the right media environment, so ecological issues are expected to perform within the processes of the corporate world. This is the environment which has spawned eco-modernism. Today, the basis for most discussions about future change is stasis. Proposals do not challenge business as usual, which is why the idea is being publicly debated seeks to preserve the core of the way things are. This is the contradictory paradigm within which George Monbiot is trapped. His columns in the Guardian are sparsely sourced and sometimes factually flawed. My last public deconstruction of one of his columns was published in May 2020. When he attacked the then recently released film, Planet of the Humans. I wrote a 20 page complaint about the column, with numerous academic references to the Guardian's readers editor. I never received an acknowledgement, despite sending it twice. The structural flaw in George's Guardian column was the fallacy of affirming the consequent. It suggested that as right-wing climate deniers like Michael Moore's new film, then the position that more depicted must be friendly to climate denial too. In reality, many anti-greens didn't like the film's message. The reason they talked up the film was precisely because the message made liberal environmentalists in America feel uncomfortable. The column attacked the film's assertion, that photovoltaic panels produce little energy once manufacturing costs are considered. George says, On average, a solar panel generates 26 units of solar energy for every unit of fossil fuel energy required to build and install it. It would appear George hadn't read his source. It states those figures cannot be quoted in that context, because it underestimates the impacts of the panels by 30 to 250%. In that same paragraph, he attacks the filmmaker's statement that you use more fossil fuels to do this than you're getting benefit from it. You would have been better off just burning the fossil fuels in the first place. That quote has been taken out of context. That statement is not about solar PV or wind power. It's about the gas-fired Ivan Parr solar array, a wholly different type of technology to PV. George then goes on to state, Planet of the humans also claims that you can't reduce fossil fuel use through renewable energy. Coal is instead being replaced by gas. Unfortunately, that is precisely what the official energy statistics in the USA show is happening. From 2010 to 2019, as old coal-fired plants are retired, they were replaced with new, larger gas-fired plants, using the large quantities of fracked natural gas being produced at that time. There is also academic research to back up the point made in the film. George then goes on to state that, in the third quarter of 2019, renewables in the UK generated more electricity than coal, oil and gas plants put together. As a result of the switch to renewables in this country, the amount of fossil fuels used for power generation has halved since 2010. The third quarter is late summer, when power demand is at its lowest and solar hits maximum. It's not representative of the average demand and supply. More significantly though, what's been dominating energy trends in Britain has been the collapse of electricity demand. That is in part the result of austerity-choking growth, and especially heavy industries, such as metals and chemicals, moving offshore. Those effects are far more significant than new renewable capacity in cutting fossil fuel use, but that doesn't even merit a mention. Especially over 2015 and 2016, much of the retired coal-fired capacity was matched by natural gas, not new renewable capacity. Increasing renewable capacity was roughly balanced by the reduction in nuclear generation, and the fact electricity demand shrank by over a fifth, from 2010 to 2019, means that in percentage terms, without adding a single wind turbine or solar panel, the proportion of renewable energy would have increased anyway. Georgian introduces the most toxic argument which eco-modernists promote to silence opposition, accusations of malfusely and population control, where again the film is misquoted. The film offers only one concrete solution to our predicament, the most toxic of all possible answers. We really have to start dealing with the issue of population, without seeing some sort of made-a-dive-in population, there's no turning back. George's column uses an ellipsis to run two sentences together in the extract from the film. That jump wasn't just a few words or a sentence, it skips almost two minutes of discussion. In running those statements together, it completely ignores the context within which each was made, specifically the issue regarding the use of energy in agriculture. His column concludes this section by stating, High consumption is concentrated in countries where population growth is low, when wealthy people, such as Maureen Gibbs, point to this issue without the necessary caveats, they are saying in effect, it's not us consuming, it's them breeding, it's not hard to see why the far-right loves this film. I challenge the Guardian's editors to find any point in the transcript of the film where this is implied, and to listen to the caveats about the rich nation's consumption which were made throughout the film. In fact, during that ellipsis where George admits what is discussed, it is stated, we have to have our abilities to consume reined in because we're not good at reining them in if there are seemingly unrestrained resources. George Mambo is not promoting the objective evidence-based view of our predicament. He is promoting ideological, idealized vision for how the affluent states can continue their current lifestyle by adopting new and more efficient technologies, a sort of ecological, have your cake and eat it too. That's not a problem, objectively, I'm doing the same too, by making these observations, albeit from a radically different perspective. Instead, what we need to pursue is why George Mambo, apparently winningly, misquotes what is said in the film to cast slurs about right-wing conspiracies, uses academic research in a manner that is specifically excluded by its authors, misrepresents official energy statistics to imply something they do not show, and thus, overall, denies what a large body of research evidence now demonstrates to be a fair assessment of our ecological predicament. Sorry to butt in with a quick ad-lib, but if you'd like to see more content like this, then you really should consider liking this video, subscribing to my YouTube channel, perhaps leaving a comment below, and following me on social media. In today's digital analytics popularity contest, all that button-pressing means something in this messed up world, and if we're going to challenge that, then we have to do our bit to whack the algorithms, supporting the kind of content we want to see by clicking on it. It isn't just George doing these kinds of myths or selective quoting. Here's but one example of a broadly similar trend. That's because ecomodernism has a data problem. First advanced by figures such as Stuart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and Aymary Lovin's, ecomodernism came out of the American environmental movement in the 1980s, proposing a simple idea. The only way to beat the destructive business process is to do business better than they can, in an ecological way, the assumption being that higher efficiency would enable economic competition due to higher productivity and hence profitability. Though there are various manifestos and institutes, ecomodernism is not a coherent group. It represents a spectrum of ideas. Generally though, ecomodernism is heavily influenced by liberal economic theory. The idea of free globalised markets are relanced on technological innovation and efficiency to drive down impacts while driving up productivity, the maintenance of property rights, and the unquestioned adherence to the western lifestyle and the need to perpetuate the affluence of material consumption that lifestyle demands. This is where ecomodernism hits the reality of the ecological crisis. For all their protestations, basically the firmer dynamics say no. In particular, energy efficiency is not open-ended. It's a one-time saving after which wholly new technologies must be invented or systems significantly changed. And in general, it's a diminishing return with fixed theoretical limits where each improvement saves less and less. At the heart of ecomodernism's ideas is decoupling, the assumption that the use of technology can break the link between human lifestyles and their ecological impact, which currently has no strong evidence to support it. As with neoliberal ideology in general, ecomodernists will not accept strong ecological limits. Despite the fact that recent research confirms that after 50 years, the limits to growth study is still on track. And they do not consider the embodied footprint of their activities on resource depletion and pollution, and if pressed will invoke the quasi-mystical power of innovation to solve that without proof of its feasibility. From the strongly technocratic end of the ecomodernist spectrum, that transition is innately collected to nuclear power, despite the fact there's not enough uranium to do this. For the stronger ecological end of ecomodernism, that transition is connected to the use of 100% renewable energy, despite the growing evidence to show that there are insufficient mineral resources to construct the scale of infrastructure required to replace the energy service of fossil fuels. When I give lectures, this is the point where people are often confused. If the highly technological solution to climate change is not possible, and the renewable solution to climate change is not possible, then what option is there? The fact people commonly ask this question demonstrates why George Monbiot and the other ecomodernist pundits in the media have become an obstruction to the ecological debate. There's an entire movement around degrowth and the simplification of human lifestyles, which is not currently being referenced within the UK media. That's because it challenges the implicit bias of mainstream environmentalism. It entails reducing material affluence and tackling the excessive consuming lifestyles through the national and global redistribution of resources. Take, for example, electric cars. The media debate is presented as the divide between petrolheads and green consumers, but neither side ever enters into a discussion to justify maintaining the private car as the priority for moving around. In 2020, the Climate Change Committee canvassed opinion on electric vehicles. An expert panel assembled by the Natural History Museum told the Climate Change Committee that to replace all UK-based vehicles today with electric vehicles, would take 207,900 tonnes of cobalt, 264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate, at least 7,200 tonnes of neodymium and dysprosium, in addition to 2,362,500 tonnes of copper. This represents, just under two times the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters of the world's lithium production and 12% of the world's copper production during 2018. Even ensuring the annual supply of electric vehicles only, from 2035 as pledged, will require the UK to annually import the equivalent of the entire cobalt needs of European industry. Mineral resources are a significant barrier, and the Climate Change Committee's response to this critical issue being spelled out by Britain's preeminent geological institute was silence. A briefing they publish later doesn't even mention the issue. Put that case differently, a grid-powered trolleybus moves passengers many times more efficiently than multiple battery-powered cars. So where is the lobby for the elimination of cars? It does exist, but it gets little media coverage, as it challenges one of the dominant assumptions of the consumer lifestyle, the primacy of the private car. Renewable energy in green technologies, such as electric cars, are dependent upon mass electrification, and as a result, a huge expansion in metal production using resources which have a finite, limited supply. There is also growing evidence that the extraction of these resources across the globe could be especially damaging to biodiversity. Some of these metals, such as copper, cobalt, or rare earths, are so limited that they are a barrier to a Green New Deal-type plan. And as these metals deplete, the energy return of renewable technologies will continually fall in the future, as the energy used in their extraction increases. Even if we innovate, such as swapping lithium with sodium in batteries, trace amounts of rare earths and other metals are still required, and the yet-to-be-invented nanotechnologies proposed as substitutes have an uncertain efficiency or efficacy. How, then, can groups promoting the Green New Deal, such as zero carbon Britain, advocate 100% renewable energy without also advising of the resource or pollution risks inherent in that project? The reason, from my own experience, arguing with zero carbon Britain for over a decade is that they just ignore them. They ignore them because the people in power, like the Climate Change Committee, don't want to hear them, and so they exclude them from their considerations. What is certain is that while a segment of the globally affluent may be able to scrape a carbon-free lifestyle, there are not sufficient resources to allow everyone else on the planet to consume in that way, and the overriding reliance on a single metric to judge progress. Carbon emissions is leading to a willing ignorance over both the global pollution, resource depletion, or biodiversity loss that would result from such a green future. As people have demanded my opinion on this recently, do I think that George Monbiot is being funded by corporate interest to talk about precision fermentation? I really don't think that matters at all. Whether he's being funded or not doesn't change the underlying technical arguments, and to raise that as an issue distracts from the evidence for why he is wrong. Motive is not the issue here, the issue here is evidence. Let's address the big issue first. Technically, there is no food production crisis. As George commented in his interview with Owen Jones, world hunger is rising, now probably extending to a billion people or more, including in the most affluent states. That last part is a critical issue. The reason people in affluent states skip meals is the same reason as those in poor states die of malnutrition. It's an issue of allocation, not production. The reasons for world hunger and malnutrition in both poor and rich states, depending upon the location, are variously the result of economic inequality, climate change, conflict or displacement, natural disasters, urbanization and or isolation from the land, restricting access to food except by payment, poor diet due to the economic or social barriers to accessing good quality food and social or state imposed barriers restricting access to land or food by certain groups. Precision fermentation is the idea that by using genetically engineered microorganisms grown inside industrial vats, protein can be produced far more efficiently and with secondary processing and chemical additives, those simple proteins can be engineered into nutritious meat substitutes. Given that brief summary, does anything stated there address the points in the list of reasons behind global hunger? No. To even talk about precision fermentation in the same context as hunger belittles the global inequalities that drive it and distracts from the necessary changes to national and global governance in order to change those outcomes. The root of global hunger is inequality. Global inequality is not the fault of those who are hungry, it is due to the choices of those running the national and global governance systems. That system is dominated by a globally affluent elite, where the 10% of the world's population benefiting from that mechanism consume half of everything, while the bottom half consume just 10%. Let's be absolutely clear on this. There is a human right to food. The fact hundreds of millions are hungry, yet enough food is produced for all is a matter of political choice, not fate. I've read George Monbiot's book, Regenesis. Personally, I've found his recent books rather rambling. Lamenting the ills of the world, yet ignoring the radical solutions available if he could only remove his mental shackles to society as it is. We need to stop worrying about how bad things are and concentrate on the simplest ways to make them better. For example, in chapter five he says, City farms, allotments and guerrilla gardens help us to feel a sense of connection to the land and engage our minds and hands in satisfying work. But with one or two exceptions, it's unlikely to satisfy more than a tiny fraction of demand. The reasons should be obvious. Land in cities is scarce and expensive. Why is land in cities expensive? Because it is owned by a minute minority of the population called landlords. Why is that an ecological issue? Climate change is a physical restriction on humanity. How much food you can grow on a square metre of soil is also a physical restriction. In contrast, property rights are made up in the minds of humans. They don't exist just like the monetary values they are traded with. They are not a physical restriction. If we are truly saying that climate change and ecological breakdown are existential, that society lives or dies by what we do in the next decade, who could support a wholly abstract division of the land in a way which prevents people from providing their needs in the most low-impact way. Once again, we come back to the issue of inequality. In Britain, less than 1% of the population own half the land. In the Genesis, George argues that the intellectual property rights on the solutions to climate change must be weakened. Why then can't we also restrict property rights on the land, or cap land values, or tax wealth, to facilitate low-impact lifestyles? George attacked the film Planet of the Humans because of its alleged promotion of population control. In a short film based on the Genesis, George opens with the statement, People say we have a population crisis, and we do, but it's not us, it's them. Farmed animals are now increasing in number about twice as fast as human beings. Apparently, it's okay to be speciesist, but not racist. He may have said this ironically, but the issues surrounding animal agriculture are far more complex than this, and to dismiss that complexity for a simplistic technological pipe dream makes no sense. He then proceeds to market his main idea. Now, in Helsinki, Finland, scientists are brewing up an entirely different kind of food. Inside these tanks, protein is being produced by bacteria. The only inputs are water, carbon from the air, a sprinkling of nutrients, and electricity to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen. And the only waste product is water. Earlier, I mentioned the problems of the Green New Deal, and the barriers to expanding renewable energy to replace fossil fuels. By advocating the use of electricity to produce protein, perhaps 25 times more energy per unit of protein produced, it necessarily involves a certain level of minerals extraction, a certain level of pollution, and a certain level of biodiversity loss as a result of those operations. Are any of those impacts factors into George's presentation of the process? No. Finland is a good example. While a quart of their electricity comes from hydro and wind, her and the same comes from nuclear, and that is projected to rise as their new, delayed, and massively over budget European pressurized water reactor comes online. Does the fermentation process therefore consume uranium and produce high-level nuclear waste? Arguably, yes. Is that considered in George's model? No. I don't want to labour the point, but this model of how the process works is highly misleading. It doesn't measure all the related impacts of creating the electricity, or extracting and purifying the artificial nutrients, or the associated energy and pollution costs of processing the protein gloop into cultured meat. It's very much like the nuclear industry's argument that nuclear power doesn't emit carbon dioxide, and yet from the concrete in the reactor to the ore processing at the uranium mine, greenhouse gases are embodied throughout that process. In affluent states, the major source of protein is meat, but in poor states, the major source of protein is vegetables and cereals. How does that square with George's assumption that meat production for the global population is a homogeneous issue? Humans need roughly 50 to 60 grams of protein per day. On average, most countries scrape that amount in their national diet, but in the affluent world, people on average consume at least twice that amount or more. Does George discuss the inequality of global protein intakes, and how that too leads to damaging health impacts, just as too little protein does? Not that I can find. Turning to George's recent column in The Guardian, we see the same simplistic narrow boundary analysis applied as justification. The first is to shrink to a remarkable degree the footprint of food production. One paper estimates that precision fermentation using methanol needs 1700 times less land than the most efficient agricultural means of producing protein, soy, grown in the US. This suggests it might use, respectively, 138,000 and 157,000 times less land than the least efficient means, beef and lamb production. According to both his book and his column then, the choices between intensive animal agriculture, intensive soy production, or precision fermentation. That's an entirely false dilemma, ignoring the large body of evidence on the viable alternative options. His book Regenesis doesn't discuss permaculture or integrated polyculture. Even their recent research shows those systems to be far less polluting, and as much, if not more productive, than the intensive farming system that he rails against. Even urban allotments, which he dismisses in the book, are as good as, if not more productive than intensive agriculture, with high levels of biodiversity. If we know there are easily implementable systems that can produce the same, if not more food, with less impacts, why doesn't Georgie evaluate those other options? Why doesn't he investigate the details behind why a third of the world's food is grown by small farmers using only a quarter of the farm's land area, hence a third more productive than intensive agriculture? And how does this characterisation of the problem of protein production fit the varied models of small-scale agriculture or indigenous animal herders or hunters who do not practise intensive production? These alternatives are dismissed without investigation. Interviewed by Aaron Bestani, the man who wrote the book on fully automated luxury communism, one hour in, George states, By doing it this way, you can localise your food production, and it can be much cheaper. You're not paying soft currencies for hard currencies. You're not using your local currency to buy stuff on the dollar market. You're producing your own food locally, and it could have a massive impact in reducing hunger, but also in allowing people to assert sovereignty over their own food supply. Those points apply even more strongly to locally-based agriculture or small-scale production on plots or urban allotments than to precision fermentation. Consider the upfront demand for electricity, water, concentrated nutrients, and a processing capacity to turn the protein gloop into an appetising foodstuff. Are those factors which are all locally available? Clearly not. Even locally produced solar electricity requires photovoltaic panels, which are the product of a globalised mining, manufacturing and logistics chain that operates on the hard dollar currencies he's being critical of. George's analysis of the land required to support cultured meat is incomplete. It doesn't include the land take of the system's externalities, such as power generation, nutrient production, or the landmine for metal or phosphate resources. Unless that essential part of the system is included, he is not making a like-for-like comparison, and so no claims can be made as to its advantage. In contrast, what the localised permaculture or integrated polyculture systems depend on? Seeds. Literally the most complex part of a local food system is developing the right seed varieties for the local climatic conditions, and once obtained, they can be simply grown and shared, no hard currencies or mechanised logistics chains required. Small-scale animal agriculture, integrated into fodder cover and nutrient cycling, may be part of that process, especially at high latitudes where the growing season is shorter. That, again, is something that requires a local assessment of the best option for food production. But to reduce this entire debate to technology will save us, is simplistic, illogical, and not based upon evidence. I have wrestled with virginuses since I've read it. His recent Guardian columns only add to my concern about his public pronouncements. I can rationalise their flaws and failures in only one way. The levels of compromise George Monbiot engages in to maintain his position within the media environment mean that he can no longer represent ecological reality to his audience. Multilevel marketing, created off the back of the social media boom, is as revolutionary as the fears raised by Vance Packard about the marketing boom in the 1950s. Whether by direct payment, goods in kind, or just because of the group identity it confers, the manipulation of social influencers by political, financial and industrial interests represents a new world west in, to use Edward Bernays' famous phrase, the engineering of consent. George Monbiot is such an influencer and a valued one, as his audience is largely made up of the affluent middle class with disposable incomes. And in the marketing of that message, unlike other advertisers, he is wholly unaccountable as he accentuates the positive and buries the bad news. Although Johnathan Pirate may have felt either the honesty or the entitlement to state the assumptions behind the eco-modernist viewpoint, many do not. They bend and twist their ideas to avoid ever confronting reality, that their technocratic machinations are devised to maintain their material entitlements. Eco-modernism can never address the economic and social inequalities which benefit the globally affluent while creating suffering or hunger for other living beings, humans included. Just like the establishment's failure to address colonialism, doing so would question their own political and economic advantage in the here and now, raising difficult questions of justice and accountability for past policies. When I raised the issue of class identity, affluence and the ecological crisis, a number of people in the environment movement, especially of the eco-modernist persuasion, are driven to apoplexy. I understand that. It challenges the very basis of their self-identity and hence their security and well-being. But it's equally valid to require anyone objecting to this approach to view the issue from the opposite side, from the majority who are economically excluded from the debate, and why the low-tech, low-impact options for change are excluded from that debate as the privileged pundits leading it feel uncomfortable talking about them. Through his columns in The Guardian in his recent book, George Mambio has created talking points that seek an ecologically benign stasis in the human system, ignoring the needs and current predicament of the nationally and globally poor. To even mention the word hunger in the context of precision fermentation, I find offensive. To talk of technocratic solutions that are reliant upon globalised commodity systems, when the barriers to access and food are the result of the neocolonial domination of world resource production, I find repugnant. What I have not raised here is George's Reboot Food Initiative, and in particular his manifesto, including calls to legalised gene editing, without specifying which of the many processes available should be made legal, calls to rewilding, without specifying what that means and to what extent rewilding people is permitted, and calls for greater food labelling, which presumes the perpetuation of a highly centralised industrial food production and distribution system. That manifesto deserves a deep dive of its own. If eco-modernism is focused on enabling certain technological or consumer choices, when many are excluded from those choices, not simply by price, but by the fact they can barely scrape the basics for a viable lifestyle, then how is that debate ever going to create a mass movement for change? Worse still, the political right that George seems so afraid of will weaponise that failure to engage across the social spectrum, to obstruct change, and to alienate those making such arguments. George Mombio has a highly privileged position, which he could use positively. He could deconstruct the economic and social processes that created his privilege, and through that process, both advocate for radical ecological change and build bridges with those economically excluded from the advantage that he has benefited from. He chooses not to do that. Instead, he advocates for solutions which preserve the economic advantage of the Western lifestyle above any criticism that it is physically and practically beyond salvage. We must revivify the radicalism that parrots are nervous excluded from the movement in the 1980s as they sought compromise with the establishment and reinvigorate the deep ecological debate on materialism and inequality that has been suppressed for too long. We need seeds, not solenoids, plots, not vats, gardens, not economic globalisation. Above all, we need land rights and access to land, to disengage in the global economic system that is the root of human exploitation and ecological destruction. For a catchy sound bite to encompass that, let's say we need to re-wild the people alongside all the other animals. As I have reviewed here, George Monbiot's representation of ecological issues in the media has become increasingly narrow, biased towards the perpetuation of affluence and establishment power, and as a result, he is apparently twisting, misquoting or stating incomplete information in order to maintain that position. What he promotes is an extreme centrism which, through highly questionable technocratic schemes, seeks to preserve the entitlements of affluence against the inevitable crash of that lifestyle. As a result, he is sanitising ecological destruction and global inequality to maintain the artificial lifestyle of the affluent minority who have benefited the most from industrialisation, which, in the end, is what has created the ecological crisis, and which must be curtailed to advert it.


And all of this, let's turn to Antonio Vittorino. He's the director general for the UN's International Organization for Migration and joins me now live from Geneva. Mr. Vittorino, thank you very much for joining us this morning. And we continue as you just saw in that piece to see really heartbreaking and desperate scenes as people flee what is clearly an escalating war. Give us a sense of the magnitude in your eyes of what is unfolding here. This is the most dramatic humanitarian crisis in Europe since World War II. And if there is no ceasefire right away, we will be plunged into a real humanitarian catastrophe. Your figures are right. More than 1.1 million have fled the country. This is above the figures of 2015 for the Syrian arrivals. This is well above the figures of the Balkan Wars in the 90s of last century. And I'm not counting because we do not know exactly now how many internally displaced people are inside Ukraine because of the conflict. So all in all, this is an humanitarian catastrophe. And of course, if there is no ceasefire, sir, how what more can be done, what do you expect to see in the coming months, if not years, if this continues? Well, there is the urgent and the very urgent. The very urgent is to build on the humanitarian corridors that there has been a sign from the Ukrainian-Russian conversations. But these humanitarian corridors need to be a two-way corridor. First, to allow people to leave the country. Those who are willing to leave. But secondly, these humanitarian corridors need to guarantee safety for the transportation of the goods that are absolutely indispensable to assist the thousands of internally displaced Ukrainians, particularly in hospitals. We are very concerned that the hospitals in Ukraine are being eaten by the war. There is no oxygen. There is scarcity of blood, equipment and medicines. So humanitarian corridors is right now, and we need to jump immediately there. And the urgent, of course, as you mentioned also before, it's to guarantee the protection of those who leave the country and who are in the neighboring countries who have generously accepted their entrance, more than 1.1 million people. Let's talk about those leaving the country, sir. Unfortunately, our teams on the ground, I've heard some very disturbing stories of, I think it's fair to say, of discrimination, of xenophobia against non-Europeans. Have a listen to this. Yes, sir. Our parents are home waiting for us. All the time it comes into my mind, I feel like crying. Ukraine is a beautiful country, but you don't have to treat us like this. They don't have to treat us like this. Why is this happening? Yes, unfortunately, this is happening. There are different reasons, but of course we have already approached the authorities, both in Ukraine and in the neighboring countries, to make sure that everybody who is fleeing the country, irrespective of their nationality, of their territory of origin, of the color of their skin are allowed to cross. And when they come to the neighboring countries, IOM is there to support them. And for those who want to return to their countries or of origin to facilitate their return. But there is no excuse for any kind of discrimination according to the nationality. All our human beings, all need to be treated on equal food. All are fleeing from war. But you acknowledge, sir, that this is happening? Yes, absolutely. We have reports, credible reports, verified reports and we are acting with the authorities because on both sides, in spite of the war, there is a responsibility of the authorities to guarantee the safety and the security of all human beings. And the missiles do not discriminate according to the nationality.  Mr. Vitorino, let me ask you about the EU and its decision, as we mentioned, to step up and to approve a plan to grant really temporary residence to Ukrainians. How urgent, how important is this right now? I praise very much the decision of the European Union. I must confess that this directive, the temporary protection directive, was my proposal when I was 20 years ago commissioner for justice and home affairs. So I know very well what we are talking about. It was precisely for this kind of situations that the directive was drafted is to provide immediate protection and assistance irrespective of the nationality for those who are fleeing conflicts and come to rescue, to search rescue here in the European Union member states. So I praise very much this decision. Now it's necessary to guarantee the necessary support from the international community to provide the assistance to those who can benefit for temporary protection. And Tony Vitorino, please stay in touch with us. Let us know how your team on the ground is doing and really what they're facing. Appreciate it taking the time to speak to us. Thank you very much. Muito obrigado. Thank you. Obrigado.


In this video, I want to talk about translating, I'm going to talk about translating absolute value functions, okay? So now before we start this video, you've got to have an idea of what an absolute value is and kind of what it does to numbers, what it does to a function, things like that. Now your basic understanding of an absolute value is, now from a very rudimentary point, it basically just makes everything inside the absolute value, whatever number is inside the absolute value, it makes it positive, it's a very rudimentary understanding of it. Basically, now what an absolute value actually is, is the distance on a number line from zero to that number, that's what an absolute value is. So that's kind of what we're dealing with here. Now absolute values do something a little bit different to graphs, we have to have an idea of what they look like, so we'll read through the direction and I'll graph what one looks like and then we'll make our transformations for that, because I have two different examples here, two different transformations. I should say translating, which moves everything either up, down, left, or right. All right, so directions, perform the following transformations of f of x equals the absolute value of x, then graph each transformed function. Okay, so what I'm going to do first is I'm actually going to take f of x, I'm going to take this function and I'm going to graph it on my grid here. That way we have an idea of what we're moving up, down, left, and right. Okay, so start at zero, zero for this function, start at zero, zero. Okay, now it's actually going to look very similar to a linear function. So the thing is when I plug in an x of one, so if I plug in an x of one, that's when I plug in one, the absolute value of one is one. So I plug in one and I get out of it one. If I plug in two, I get out of it two. I plug in three, I get out of it three. Okay, so as you can well imagine, right here, this is what your absolute value looks like. Okay, now let's go to the other side, a little bit different when I plug in these negative numbers. When I plug in negative one, it's actually going to take the absolute value of that number and it's going to get a positive one. So a negative one, when I plug it in, when I get out of it is a positive one. Negative two, when I plug it in, I get a positive two. Negative three, when I plug it in, I get a positive three.  Whatever number I have in there, it just basically makes it positive because you're asking yourself the question, what is the distance from zero to that number on a number line? So what is the distance from zero to negative three on the number line? Well, it's just three. It's a y-coordinate of three, so that's what we get out of this. Anyway, so basically our absolute value function, we'll call this one f. Call this one f and block here. That is what an absolute value function looks like. Okay, so now we're going to take that function. We're going to move it up, down, left, right. We're going to do whatever we want to with it. Okay, so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to move everything five units down. Okay, change my colors here. We're going to move everything five units down. And the first thing I'm going to do is perform the following transformation, which kind of means I'm going to use notation to show this. And then I'm going to graph each one of them. And then I'm going to graph the new function. I'm going to code this so I can tell the difference between my different functions. Okay, so what am I going to do first? I'm going to move this five units down. So what I'm going to do is take my original function. I'm going to change it. Now, if I move it five units down, I take the function and I subtract five from it. Take the function and subtract five from it. Okay, that is moving the function five units down. Okay, now if you don't quite understand how to transform or translate units, I do have previous videos on how to transform and translate different functions. You can search for those. Okay, now, so this is basically what I'm going to do. Take your function, change it by taking the function and subtracting five from it. Okay, so my new function g of x. Okay, so the new one is g of x. The old one is f. The new one is g. Okay, it is going to be the old one, but I'm going to subtract five from it. Okay, so notice the different notation. Now, I'm actually introducing a new function here. Okay, I'm not using these arrows anymore. Okay, now I'm using equations. Okay, so g of x is then going to be, I take the old function, which is, now the old function is just the absolute value of x. That's all it is. Absolute value of x. That's this piece right here is the absolute value of x. This piece, absolute value of x, and subtract five from it. So my g of x function is equal to absolute value of x minus five. Okay, so that's what the equation looks like. That's what, excuse me, the function looks like. Now what I want to do is I want to graph that. I want to graph that. Now, actually these are pretty easy to graph. What I want to do is I want to take this absolute value of function and just move everything down five units. Move everything down five units. So take each one of these points that I have here and move them down five. So one, two, three, four, five. Now this is actually pretty easy to graph. We just go up one right one, up one right one, and up one left one, up one left one. So get a couple of points on here. Get some of my points on here. And get my arrows on there because that goes on forever. All right, there we are. Okay, so there is my new function. I called this one, I called it g. I'm going to label it g over here so I can tell the difference between all of them. Not only can I color code, but I can use letters to know the difference between the two of them. Okay, I'm going to change colors here and go down to this next one. And that was it. So we wrote the, we performed the transformation. So this is what the function is going to look like. And then we took the graph of the function, the old one, and then we moved everything five units down. So now we have what the new one looks like. Okay, so I'm going to do one more example. And this time I'm going to go one unit left. So I'm showing you an example of going up and down. And I'm going to show you an example of going left and right. Okay, it's going to be a little bit different, a little bit different. Okay, so I'm going to take my old function, I'm going to take my old function. I'm going to change it by taking the function and I'm going to add or subtract directly to the x. Whenever I move left or right, I add or subtract directly to the x. Now in this case, as I'm moving left, I'm going to add one directly to the x. Okay, so that's what the notation looks like. Notice the difference between moving left and right and then moving up and down. Left and right, up and down. Up and down is much, much easier. I will admit. Up and down is much, much easier. Left and right is a little bit harder because you have to add directly to the x. Alright, so that's kind of what the mapping notation looks like. So instead of using g, I'm going to use a different function notation. I'll use h. h of x is a common one we use. So h of x is going to be, this function is going to be our old function, x of x, excuse me. I actually don't want that parentheses there. There we go. So we take our old function and we're going to add one directly to the x. Okay, now our old function is this up here. It's a square root, or it's going to be the absolute value of x. So I want to take the absolute value of x, but instead of an x, I want an x plus one. Notice I'm adding one directly to this x. We're inside the absolute value here, inside the absolute value. A little bit different from doing it in the ups and downs. Ups and downs are outside, left and right are inside. So then my new function, h of x, is then going to be equal to the absolute value of x plus one. Nope, nope, nope. What am I doing there? Nope, there we go. Gotta put the lines in there, not parentheses. There we go. Okay, so that's what the notation looks like. That's what the function is going to look like. Now I'm simply going to graph it. Okay, now graphing is a little bit easier. Grapping is a little bit easier. We just want to move all the units, all the points once to the left. So I'm going to take my old function and move everything one to the left. So I'm going to take all these points, move them once to the left. So right here, right here, right here, right there. Just want to look to the left here, there, and over here. Y in between all the points. Y in between all the points. And this blue one here is my h function. And now you can see why we need to kind of label our functions. Notice how things are overlapping here. We need to have good labels on our functions so that we can read it. Okay, so that's just a couple of examples of translating absolute value functions, basically moving them up, down, left, and right, and showing some of the notation to go along with it. Okay, showing some of the notation that goes along with it.  They basically look like these. They're pretty simple functions to work with. One thing you just got to remember, if I'm moving up or down, I'm going to add or subtract from the whole function. Or if I'm moving left or right, I'm going to add or subtract directly to the x function. And the notation's a little bit harder to work with, but that's what we do when we want to move left and right. Alright, again, that's just a couple of examples of translating absolute value functions.


Let's just do this That's me I've been so excited to do this video ever since I had the idea whilst recording my creepy fiver art video Imagine if I just scroll down and it's just my face reveal like every detail to a tee So I think you know how this is going to work I had a friend create a bunch of orders from different character to artists Sending them my cartoon character and asking them to draw what they think I look like in real life They've all completed the task and the final artworks have been compiled into a PDF to look at for the first ever time today Whoa, it was nerve-wracking enough just looking at one of these in my creepy art video But today we're going to be looking at five different attempts to review. Oh my god Here's a quick rundown of the costs $21 and 13 cents $38 and 91 cents $38 and 91 cents again $38 and 91 cents for the third time and $56 and 68 cents making a grand total of $194 and 54 cents AUD nowhere near as heartbreaking for my wallet as the previous video like this Phew, let's begin All right, I have the PDF file open now. I am extremely nervous, but very excited as well So, uh, let's go caricature portraits artist attempt to guess the jelly just face reveal. All right, let's go Oh attempt to one. Oh My god, this is so realistic. Oh my goodness Damn the detail in this like look at all the shadows. I absolutely love the painted style They went with it's like an oil painting, but like digital It just looks so good and just look at the details in the eyes. Oh my goodness It looks like they kept the hair shape very much like my character very Puffy and wavy But it looks great. I also just want to talk about the proportions with this as well Like it's such a small little body with a massive head and like massive eyes and big nose and everything It definitely fits the caricature vibes.  They're not that big though And probably maybe the eyebrows. This is a great first attempt of them guessing what I look like Let's see. What else is on the table attempt number two We're scrolling. Oh my goodness. Hello. I am cheery here. Oh my god There is some character behind this one. I'm just happy to be here It's definitely more a cartoony sort of art style, especially like with the mouth and nose We got some pretty wild hair going on, but what can I say that one's pretty accurate They're sort of like a blurred 3d effect around the whole drawing, which is really cool It definitely looks to be green and purple So that's a win. I love the luscious eyelashes as well and those eyebrows on fleek But they are very good. So all the facial features and their hair together here I say this one probably looks more like me than the other one But who knows that could be a natural photo of my face coming up I'm probably more so excited now than scared, but let's just keep going attempt three So we're gonna continue scrolling Hi That's me Where is it? I will just say here This looks nothing like me, but I love the details if I'm being generous I would probably say the hair and the eye color But um as for everything else probably not these are definitely not my facial features But this was a really good attempt and as always the art is great attempt four Okay, so my friend has informed me that this next one is actually by the same artist who we just saw However, they were different listings. So this one's gonna look a little bit different. So let's go I've got some purple eyes Okay, this one does look a bit different to the other one But I feel like there's more detail in the hair. That was the first thing I noticed other than the purple eyes Wait, do vampires have purple eyes? I definitely noticed there's more detail in like the hood and hair and even some like highlights on the side of my face Oh, would you look at that? The hoodie is even different. I do like this one more But however, this still looks nothing like me. So um number five. This is the last one Let's just do this Oh my goodness That's me Hello there It looks like I'm a bit unsure POV I'm looking at myself. I do have a few things to say about this I off the bat. I believe this one probably is the furthest one away From what I look like even though this doesn't look like me We can't deny that this artist is so talented. Just look at all the detail in the hair and even the eyes My face is very shiny here. It kind of looks like I put on a Fat layer of sunscreen SPF 50 and it kind of looks like I've got some derp eyes going on I'm honestly blown away with the result of this just all the detail I can never stop talking about the detail That was such a fun ride to go through and they all had their own unique twist on what they imagined I might look like let's finally reveal how true to life. They really are onto the tier list Once again, I'm rating these with how close they look like me nothing to do with the price Okay, I think we can all agree that sweaty Jess is going in nowhere near Oh before we continue. Sorry. I'll put sweaty Jess back Okay, so we've got the closest a little bit Not really nowhere near. All right, sweaty Jess. You can go back. Okay with the closest one I believe I'm gonna go with this. Oh, no, I didn't mean to go in a little bit It's gonna go here. I think just more so the details and the hair are more accurate with this one All right So the first one we looked at with the very realistic face looking at it as a small image. It's kind of creeping me out I'm gonna maybe put it as like A little bit. All right. So now we have these guys down here I'm probably gonna say the more detailed as Eh And not really as this one here. There we have it Okay, this is what I imagine each character would sound like Hey guys, it's Hey guys, it's jelly jess. Hey guys, it's jelly jess. Hey guys, it's jelly jess. Hey guys, it's jelly jess Hey guys, it's jelly jess Sweaty addition I don't know how many other youtubers are in this strange situation where they've not done a face reveal But kind of half have as well. I hope you all enjoyed the video. I love doing these fiver ones So let me know if you have any other ideas that I should integrate into this format. Catch you later wobbly boys


And Smith picks up the ball. Rydeals offers the overlapping route. Smith carrying the ball forward, then uses Rydeals. Rydeals to Andy Cooke. There's the hat-trick! It's the dream return for Andy Cooke, who marks his return to the starting 11 with a hat-trick. He's had to wait so long to open his account this season, and then he gets three in one afternoon. He is their talisman. He is their goalscorer. He is their number nine, and their go-to man for goals last season is well and truly up and running for this campaign. We're into additional time here in South Wales. It's Newport County 1, it's Bradford City 4, and it's their first three points on the road in the league this season.


Okay, so again, welcome to Liquid Margins, and today we have a couple of wonderful guests, Beasley Knost, with Roger Williams University, and Will Mahoges from long-site. And at this time, I'd like to ask our guests to say a little something about themselves. So Beasley, why don't you take it away? Well, I teach at Roger Williams and also usually do one class at the University of Rhode Island. I teach writing and the course that I've used annotations with is this summer. It combines literature and philosophy. It's a required course, a freshman-level interdisciplinary course that all students are required to take five such courses to graduate. I think, I mean, if I'm just talking about myself, I think that's probably it. Okay, hi everybody. I'm Will Mahoges. I'm the Director of Training and E-Learning Initiatives at Longsite, and I'm also the Sakai Community Coordinator for Perio. So I kind of have two hats that I wear on my community hat and my Longsite hat. I do quite a bit of training and documentation, and we've been, Longsite has been talking with Hypothesis about partnering on maybe developing a more tight integration with Hypothesis. And so I've been doing a little bit of checking out how the LTI works in Sakai. So if you have technical type questions about how to set it up, I'm the person to ask on that front. So I guess that's pretty good for now. Okay, thank you. We also have Nate Angel from Hypothesis. Nate, would you like to say a bit? Yeah, hey, and I wanted to let you guys know I'm taking over for my colleague Jeremy Dean today to moderate the discussion here. I am super happy to be at this show in particular, because as some of you know, I have kind of a long history with Sakai. I see many old friends in the guest list. Welcome to everyone. I haven't been working with Sakai as much lately, but it's a big part of my past and I'm a big supporter, and so I'm really, really excited to do this show today with Beasley and Wilma. And so I'm calling in from beautiful sunny Portland, Oregon, where it's not sunny, which is not too surprising, because that's actually how it normally is. And I wanted to kind of start off the show today by asking our guests a little bit like how things are going, because here we are probably staring down the face of another academic term. And I'm and we're in the middle of a global pandemic, you didn't notice. And then there's a lot of other stuff going on in the world too. And I'm just wondering to ask like, you know, Beasley, how are you doing? And are you you feel ready for fall? And how are things going in your neck of the woods? I'm feeling fairly ready. You know, because I sort of the last minute, we offered an online summer course for incoming first year students. So I just had a small class of five. So I've been teaching, you know, yesterday was the last day of class. And it sort of helps me feel like I'm not relearning. I'm just going to be transferring what I've been doing. Roger Williams has worked really, really hard to make sure that students can live on campus. And we're doing flipped classrooms. And we'll never have an entire complement in the room at once. So yeah, I was the biggest challenge for me will be like learning the dance when I'm in the classroom, you know. But you know, I got to tell you, I don't know if this is the best time to say it, but but using a hypothesis or the annotations in the summer class was really helpful. Because I had five brand new students who'd never taken a college class.  So and for them to be able to ask questions and for me to be talking to them in the reading, I think was really valuable. It created a sense of being together that we wouldn't otherwise have had. That's a that's a really great point.  Now I'm my colleague, Jeremy, often talks about how we can think of the reading as a place to meet more like a place instead of a book or a thing. And it sounds like you really had that kind of sense of community this summer when you were using it. That's great. What about you, Wilma? How are you? How are you feeling about the fall? Well, I'm fortunate in that my work is usually virtual. So this hasn't been a big change for me. But we've certainly been hearing, you know, stories from people in the trenches and all the institutions that we support, you know, kind of gearing up and sort of planning for all sorts of different scenarios, whether it's fully online or hybrid or or some mixture and, you know, moving start dates and end dates around. So so yeah, we've definitely gotten a sense of, you know, kind of the uncertainty that's out there for everyone. And we've been doing everything we can to kind of help make at least the the hosting and support piece something that they don't have to worry about too much. But there's always, you know, that that training aspect of learning new tools and incorporating new tools into classes that maybe people aren't used to teaching online. So so that's definitely something that we hear from a lot of our clients. And we try to help where we can. Are you hearing a lot of that where folks that are either new to online teaching or are using tools that they haven't used before? Well, we've been getting questions about tools that are maybe new to an institution. So maybe they're setting up things for the first time, like hypothesis or other tools to enable different types of interactions with students.  And now that people have at least a little bit of lead time, they're really trying to incorporate more interaction, more kind of dialogue in their teaching. Because at least we've had a little bit of preparation for what might be to come. So so I think we're seeing a lot more of that of incorporating and leveraging tools that may be, you know, one or two people on campus have been piloting, but now they're kind of spreading it out to a wider group of folks. So it's actually kind of nice to see that sort of distribution of the educational technology and have it meet, you know, a real need for folks. So I think that's kind of exciting if that's a silver lining anyway, to expose more people to the tools that they have at their disposal. Yeah, that's interesting, the silver lining inside the dark clouds of the pandemic, right? Yeah. Well, so this is kind of an unusual show for us, because we have, you know, Beasley and Wilma really, you know, have different kinds of practices and work. You know, Beasley is a teacher, and I'm sure Wilma does a lot of teaching in her work as a trainer and so forth, but, you know, has a more technical aspect to her work. And so we have, you know, both kind of a pedagogical teacher viewpoint here and a more technical viewpoint. And I want to take advantage of that and talk a little bit later about kind of the technical integrations between hypothesis and Zaki, but I wanted to start out by talking with Beasley a little bit more deeply about how you've used annotation. And so it sounds like you used it in the summer course, and then you're planning to use it again in the fall. Could you describe a little bit more detail about those courses that you're using and how big they are and what kind of readings and sort of annotation activities you either had in the summer or planned to use in the fall and how those worked for you? Yeah. So for this summer, I tend to give them because 18-year-olds don't, I try not to ask them to absorb many pages of, say, Plato or Hegel. So I tend to give them like one to three pages of like Foucault's penopticon, that's like three pages. But they come from very different sort of backgrounds, and it was really helpful to have annotations so that I could insert little background notes, but also learn what they didn't understand. It didn't even occur to me that they wouldn't know the Plato was, and I should have known this, it's the kind of thing I would just rattle off in the classroom, but they didn't know where Plato was and where Socrates was. We did the Euthyphro, and they didn't know that was ancient Greece. And so I was able to answer that question and see how well they were understanding, especially with the, we got to Hegel. I mean, one sentence can be very tricky and it's, so I'd see how they were reading it and then I would respond to that and clarify, and very, very useful. Yeah, so I mean, at this point I wouldn't imagine assigning a reading that wasn't in a book, you know, that they had to buy without using annotations, especially for that, the literature and philosophy course, but then this fall, and I've been contributing to the planning for the department-wide online course, well, it's rooted online. We'll have this, you know, hybrid classes, but the course for, it's the very introductory writing course, the main text is going to be the letter from Birmingham Jail, and first students are going to write a summary, and then they're going to write a rhetorical analysis, then they're going to choose a 21st century text that's on a related topic and do a rhetorical analysis of that, and so, you know, I'm just going to urge that we all use hypothesis with that, and I think, you know, when they're first just understanding it, the first read through and writing the summary, be good to have one copy of the text, and then when they get to the rhetorical analysis, give them a fresh copy, because the first one won't be so full. Yeah, that's an interesting question actually about when a text gets sort of full of annotations, I think that's the right word, and so obviously one way that that can be sort of handled is, let's say that this letter from the Birmingham Jail text that you plan to use is in PDF form, I'm not sure if it is or not, but it might be a PDF and it's uploaded to many different course shells in Sakai presumably. The way that the hypothesis integration works with Sakai, each one of those courses, the students in that course and the teacher will be annotating in a private group, and so their annotations won't be visible to all the other course groups that are using it in Sakai. Now, of course, I could see that you might actually want kind of cross class dialogue to happen, you know, where people from one class are, you know, annotating together with people from other classes on the same document, and so to use the LMS integration, you could set that up if I think this would work and Wilma could probably let me know if you maybe had a Sakai class or project site or class site that where everyone in all the different classes or sections belonged and you could assign that reading there, then they would all be able to comment it on there, and then they could move back to their sort of smaller class sections when they wanted to annotate just amongst their own group. So there's a little bit of trickiness depending on like what community you want to be annotating on the text. You see what I'm saying? Okay, yeah, yeah, and I'm a newcomer to how to do all of this. I went to your workshop, what, in May or June? With the online learning consortium, maybe? Yes, yes, I think so, and that's what, you know, decided me. Yeah, yeah, I would like it also if small groups like groups of four or five had their own copy also. So I want to explore how to set that up. Is that possible in Sakai? Well, that's something that we could maybe explore a little bit later with Wilma too. I see that she might even have something to say about right now. Well, I'm just, I haven't actually tried it, but I would imagine there's a lot of places in Sakai where you can restrict content to certain groups. So if you place the link in a location that only that group can get to, that would effectively restrict it to those folks. So you could do that in assignments, you could do that in lessons or discussion forums, wherever you wanted to place the link. So if I can just cut in so Erin, who's also with us, she had a response to that. And she said you can do this with digital fingerprints, creating individual copies for each group. And she offered up a link in the chat. Yeah, I mean, we're a little bit down in the weeds now, but it's sometimes funny how hypothesis features also sometimes get in its way. And one of those features is that when you're annotating on a PDF, even if people have different copies of that PDF in different places, the annotations on it will find each other. And it uses that, it's able to do that because each unique PDF has a fingerprint on it, a digital fingerprint, which is what Erin's mentioning. And so if you, if you want people to annotate the same text in a PDF form, but not see each other's annotations on that PDF, you have to take one extra little step, because it's designed to kind of bring things together. And so if you want to break them apart more, you have to make different copies of that PDF that have different fingerprints. But I suggest we don't get too down into the technical weeds here, because our support team is ready to handle anybody with questions who wants to get into that more, including you Beasley. And there is a link there in the chat. And so we could follow up on that later, rather than dwelling too much on those technical details. But I will say that I think the thing that you're hitting on Beasley, this idea of sometimes you want very broad based annotation, right, a whole community, maybe all the incoming students working together on a single text and kind of building that community. And then sometimes you want that a very small group of people to be focused on a given text, even something that I know Wilma is interested in, just a single teacher and student annotating together on top of a work, which could be the students work, for instance, in the sense of giving feedback on student writing, or on a student selected text. And so one thing I wanted to bring Wilma into the conversation a little bit here, because, you know, because Sakai is so highly configurable, I think that there are possibilities of using hypothesis in Sakai that we don't see in other learning management systems, where there might be the possibility, for instance, of like Wilma said, there's so many places in Sakai where you could restrict access to content. So I'm thinking that there might actually already be the capability in Sakai of having a student upload a reading that then can be shared with either a small study group, or perhaps just the teacher. And I wonder, Wilma, you may not have had a chance to explore this idea very much, because I'm kind of throwing it at you right here. But does that resonate with you? Do you think there's some possibilities there? Yeah, I do think that that would be possible. Because again, if the student is uploading the work, usually with the LTI connection, it doesn't actually, the people don't show up in there until they access it. So if a student uploads their, you know, draft of a paper, and the only other person that can get to the link of that draft is the instructor, then it should just be a private annotation between the two, unless there's some other way for other people to access this uploaded assignment. I know that the ability to annotate back and forth between a student and an instructor is one that we've heard from folks that they'd like to be able to do that more, whether it's iterating on a draft of something or just grading a work and having the students be able to respond to the instructor comments. So that's definitely an area that we are interested in being able to provide more functionality in that space. Yeah, and that's something that I think hypothesis and lung sites really want to work together on is, you know, exploring all the different affordances that hypothesis and annotation could have inside Sakai. And I'm Blair had mentioned that maybe student pages could work too. And I think that that's true because, you know, web pages, there are essentially web pages can also be annotated with hypothesis. And you know, one issue is it could be that only the teacher has permissions to make hypothesis assignments. And so that it might be that the student provides the text, and then the teacher kind of assigns it back as an annotation assignment just to that student. Anyway, there's some details to work out there. And I think that's something that alongside in hypothesis will be exploring. So stay tuned on that. Yeah, Jennifer, we are going to take a moment to have Wilma show, show how how hypothesis integrates with Sakai to and I just wanted to before she we have her do that I just wanted to ask VZ one more time if so this in the course that you're teaching in the fall is that also this sort of writing in philosophy oriented course like you had in the summer. No, this is like composition. It's the basic composition course. Students can opt to take it. The required one is sort of the next step. But a lot of students opt to take this one. That makes sense. And so that's probably a course that has many sections across the school. Yes, yes. That would be really great to see even just one annotation exercise be brought into that like in the Birmingham Jail example or something like that. So that everybody was kind of building that in from the beginning because I think there's a way in which a student can kind of build reading and digital literacy by using annotation, especially in conjunction with, you know, a teacher like you beastly who's helping to guide them through this act of reading. So yeah, and I think because they're first semester first year students to and we're not going to be as present with them in the classroom, that's something, you know, like annotations really makes a difference in terms of getting them relaxed and involved. Yeah, a lot of that is used to the idea of reading and feeling relaxed and brave about it, right, too, to be able to make some comments. Well, I know people are, we could continue to talk about the interesting pedagogy side of this and that's of course where I love to dwell. But I think people are interested in sort of seeing some of the kind of technical underpinnings too. And so why don't we, Wilma, if you're ready to do this now, why don't we give you a chance to probably want to share your screen and show us around a little bit inside Sakai? Does that make sense? Sure. Yeah, let me go ahead and do a screen share. Okay, so you guys should be seeing my screen now, correct? Yes? All right. So I'm logged in as the administrator. Typically, your admin will want to install it at the system level if it's something that you're using across campus. So I'll show you that part just real briefly. I've actually already got it set up on this instance of Sakai. So we'll just kind of preview some of these settings. But when you go into the administrator workspace, there's an external tools tool that you can use to set up all sorts of LTI tools for your instance. And so if you were installing a new one, you would go to this link and configure it. I've already got it on here. So I'm just going to search for it. And let's see, we'll go to this one because I know I named it so I could find it. It's LTI at the end. So when you install it, there's a bunch of different settings. And I just want to call out a few of these because they're the ones that are sort of important to make sure that it works the way you want it to. So the tool title is what it's going to show up as in the list of tools that faculty choose from. So you just want to have it something that faculty will recognize. So if they know the tool's called hypothesis, then that would be your tool title. That's kind of the generic name that's going to show up in the tool selection list. But one setting that is important and we found this out recently, it's really important to allow that tool title to be changed because that's what allows the instructor when they're creating an assignment in their course to change the title of the link so that it's a unique title for grading purposes. So that makes it talk to your grade book correctly. So you want to make sure that that's allowed. Now some of these other things are optional, like if you wanted a custom icon, if you want to let people change the icon, those are up to your admin. The button text is one that I usually allow people to change because again you want to be able to modify that title so that it appears with the correct title when it shows up as a button. The tool status would be enabled and this server I have it stealth because I'm only using it in a couple of sites. So if it's something where you're rolling it out to just select people, you might want to stealth it and then just add it to those courses specifically in terms of making it available as opposed to having it just there for anyone to select. But if you're rolling it out to everyone at the institution, you can go ahead and make it visible for everybody and it'll show up in that tool list. This information, the launch URL, the launch key, and the launch secret, those are all going to be provided to your institution by hypothesis. So you'll get that information from them and it's unique to your account. So that information will vary depending on your individual subscriptions. Scrolling down a little bit, again there's a lot of settings in here, not all of them you need to worry about. But I do want to make sure that you check these send user names and send email addresses. That's how it knows who the people are that are in the tool and can create those accounts. And you do want to, if you expect to grade it, you want to check these boxes next to the grade related items as well as the roster. So I usually just check all four of those things under services. And this first box here allow it to be launched as a link. That's typically true. So that's a safe one to select. Some of these others you don't need to worry about too much. But this last one here allow the tool to be one of the assessment types. This is actually a new thing that's in the newer LTI changes that have just been implemented in Sakai. And if you select this option, particularly in Sakai 21 and up, it will actually let you make it an LTI assignment type using the assignment tool. And I can show you that if you guys are interested. Right now this server that I'm on is running 20x. So this is not Sakai 21 that we're looking at right now. But I did record a short video clip that shows what it looks like in 21. I didn't want to trust the QA server to not go down on me because they restarted about this time of day. Maybe if you could share the link to that video, Wilma, that people could take a look at it in their free time. Yeah, I haven't uploaded it yet. So I can share it out afterward. We can distribute it to everybody. We'll email everybody who registered and so we can share it. Okay, yeah, that'd be great. I can do that. So launching a pop-up, usually I will let that be something that people can change, because sometimes people like to have it launch in its own windows so that you get just the editor or just the annotator. Sometimes people prefer to see it framed in assignments or wherever else they are in the course. So I usually leave that up to the instructor and allow that to be changed. The rest of the items you don't have to worry about. You don't need to worry about LTI 1.3. So those are all the settings that are really important when you're setting it up from the admin area. Now once it is set up, then individual instructors will be able to just select it when they choose a tool or when they install something. And actually, you know what, let me just, I'm going to make it unstuffed so I can show you guys what that looks like in the list. Thanks. This is really helpful. We'll just kind of like basic walkthrough, especially because you know, it's too high so well. It's been so long since I've actually worked with it day to day that I fumble around a lot more. So I really appreciate this. No problem. All right. So now that I've made it unstuffed, this makes it available for anyone to select. And I'm going to go into a course here. So you would find it in Site Info. This is where you choose the tools that you want in your course. So if you go into Manage Tools here, any LTI tools that have been installed system-wide like that will show up under External Tools. So you can see there it is, the Hypothesis LTI. And I've got it in here a couple different ways because I was testing some stuff. So it would appear here. Some of our clients actually like the LTI tools to appear in this upper list. And that can be done with some properties settings that would be specific to that institution. So that's a minor thing that we could customize for you if you prefer to see it in this list up here. Otherwise it just shows up under this expandable list of external tools. So once you've selected it, if you select it here, what it does is it places it in the sidebar of the course. So it's going to show up over in the navigation menu. So that's one way to add it. As you can have it be one of your tools over here on the side. So you'll see this one, the external tool. This is one that was added in that manner. That's usually not the preferred way though. Most people prefer to add it in lessons. So if we go to lessons, that's where people will typically put the assignment right within the flow of their content. So there is an external tool here as well. So when you add content here and you choose to add external tool, you'll see any external tools that are already set up. And you can choose the one that you want. And here is where I can change those settings that I left, allow editing.  And I don't want to debug it. That's just for testing purposes. I'm going to let it open in the frame. I'm not going to launch in a pop up, but I can always change that if I choose. So let me go ahead and just pop that in there. So then it's going to take me back to my lesson page. And I see my link to the hypothesis assignment. And if I click here, it's going to take me right into that setup process. So this is where you would select the web page or PDF that you want to annotate. Now you can currently select from Google Drive or you can enter a URL. So if you wanted to use an item that's in resources, you can do that by pasting in the URL of the resource. So if you actually select something from resources in your course, I probably should have had the resources tool active in this course. I didn't think about that ahead of time. Let me just turn it on real quick. All right. So resources is where you upload your files in Sakai. And let me just upload a PDF. And then we'll go grab the URL for it. So upload a PDF file. I'll drag a file around. Let me just find one. And while Wilma is looking for it. Yeah. Sorry. I should have had a file ready to go. I didn't think about it. I'll go into a course that has a file. Let's do that. That'll be easier. New problem at all. I just wanted to invite people to ask questions in the chat or the Q&A. All right. So here's some files that are already in resources. And I'm just going to look to see, okay, you want to make sure if it's something that you're sharing across courses, which is what I'm doing right now, that it's something that's public. If it's within the site, the people in that site should have access already because they have rights to see it in the course. But I'm making this one public because I'm sharing across courses. So if you go into edit the details for an item, you can grab the URL here. And this will allow you to link it in hypothesis. So if I go back to that report that I was working with, and that was on my lessons page. So I go in here. And I'm going to paste in the URL that I got from resources. So then it places that item here and allows folks to go in and annotate on top of it. Now what we would like to do in partnership with hypothesis is make it so that you don't have to go find that URL. You can just browse and select. So we want to make that not a pain point that you have to go and copy and paste. So that's kind of on the roadmap. We're not there yet. But that is something that we want to work on making much more smooth so that instead of just the two options that you'd have a third option to browse and resources and select from there. But that's how you would add it on a lesson page. And then the other place that you can add it in Sakai 21, as I mentioned, is within an assignment. But I don't want to take too much more time. So I'll take questions. So if anybody has any questions. And as people get their thoughts in order, thank you for doing that, Wilma. And we apologize for how pesky it is. Wilma is showing there how to get a file that's in Sakai resources. We will make that. We will work to make that easier. So the one thing that Wilma didn't get a chance to show there is also the grade book integration. I actually wanted to throw it to Beasley to ask, in your classes so far, are you actually grading the annotation exercises that you've had people do? Or do you think that you would? I haven't done that yet. I'm not sure. I think I would look at level of participation. I always hesitate to grade things like asking questions and giving your thoughts on first reading or something.  So sort of more like the same way that in class classroom discussion might sort of count? Yeah, yeah, especially, you know, if half your class is online and they're not physically there just to make sure that they are doing the reading and making some comments. Yeah, I lost my mute button there for a minute. Yeah, that makes sense. And we've heard a lot of other teachers kind of come to the same kind of conclusions that you can use annotation as a way to kind of make the students reading of the text visible in the sense that if they leave a trail of breadcrumbs about the reading, it kind of makes that the fact that they did do some reading kind of visible and then also engages them with the reading more and each other. But, you know, turning it into a kind of perfunctory grading exercise where you're like, you will get 10 points for each annotation or something, you know, might make it more sterile and sort of the same way we see discussion forum grading sometimes kind of degenerate into that sort of, you know, pro forma, you must make one annotation and respond to two others kind of thing. Yeah, go ahead. I was just now thinking, though, in the writing classes when they're doing peer review, that might be a way to grade the extent to which they really look at thinking about and comment on a classmate's grade. Yeah, there could be, you know, some kind of rewards for peer interaction or something. I mean, it sounded like it happened somewhat organically in your summer course where you built that sense of community with annotation. And I wanted to ask you another question, Hubeasley. Did you ever make use of the annotation's capability to have videos or images or equations, which may not have fallen into your class purview, but rather than just text where students were maybe making other kinds of annotations with media in them? No, and I didn't know that we could do that. I would have done it, though. I mean, I have, they were reading something about, the theme was coolness, and they were reading about West African sort of philosophical ideas related to coolness. And there was written by an art historian. So there are references to the rumba and I could have put films where they could see the kind of drumming or dance and music that was being discussed in the text right there. So you just put a link to YouTube in the... Yeah, YouTube and Vimeo, and now Flipgrid, all you just embed by just pasting the URL to one of those resources directly in the annotation and it will embed automatically. And then for an image, the image needs to be available on the web somewhere, so it needs to have a URL. So it's not so much uploading it from your own computer, although you could put it in Sakai resources like Wilma just demonstrated. So adding an image can be a little more tricky unless it's something that you've already found on the web and then you can just get its URL and paste it in with a little image tag. Well, I'll definitely been using that. Yeah, it could be great for a kind of literature exploration too to enable students to think about imagery related to the text instead of words, right? Yes. Well, I know we're running a little late on long on time here and I could see Franny is getting nervous in the background there. Franny, did you have any other questions you wanted to surface? So I just had one question for Beasley. Do you find that more students, you know, when you're using collaborative annotation in the classroom, do more students quote and quote raise their hand? Especially, I'm thinking of those shy students who typically would sit in the back of the classroom. Do they feel emboldened to speak up? Yes, I think that they're more comfortable asking. What does this mean? One student started out asking, what does this mean? And then began looking up definitions and putting them in the annotations themselves, which was a nice sort of progression there. But yes, I do. There was one student who asked them at the beginning of the class what they thought was most successful from their spring semester online experience, just to get a sense of what kind of learning they all preferred. And one said that she really liked having synchronous meetings where the teachers told her what was going on and explained everything. And that student was the one who said I asked them to tell me their impressions of the annotations, because I told them I was going to do this. And she was the one who said it really helped her to read and think about what other people in the class are thinking. I think she was just the most insecure and least likely to launch into her own thoughts. And yeah, it made a real difference. The other comments were that it was really helpful. It was cool. And it works great. Makes a lot of sense. Those are the things that they gave me to pass on to you. Oh, that's great. I love it. Yeah, I mean, I would think it would build community and just as that shy student might see somebody asking a question that maybe isn't that brilliant, isn't as brilliant as they might have thought everybody else in the class is, because everyone in college feels like a fraud. So maybe when they see everyone else is sort of a frog too, not really, but you know, that it emboldens them. Cool, that's great. Thank you. Well, as Nate said, we are running out of time here. We're actually a little bit over. So thanks everyone for hanging out for a little while. We'll keep this recording running for a bit. So if you have questions, ask them in the chat. One of us will answer in the chat and then all of the resources, this recording and the chat and the slides will be available after the fact. And this was such a great show. I want to thank our guests and I want to give them also a chance to say goodbye. So Beasley, if you would start and then Wilma follow. Thank you. Yeah, well, I said thank you for asking me. I mean, I'm a brand new user and I've learned a lot about what I can do today. And yeah, I think it's so handy. I'll definitely keep using it. Thanks a lot. I'd also like to thank you guys for inviting me and for some of your great questions. And if you think of another use case of how you want to link it or what you want to do with it, let me know because it's actually one of the things that I like to do is kind of figure out how to do things that maybe are sort of edge cases. So if you're interested in exploring something that isn't immediately obvious, feel free to reach out and let me know and we'll see if we can figure out a way to make that happen for you. Great. Thank you. I also want to thank Nate Angel and everyone else from Hypothesis who was here. And also a huge welcome. I mean, thank you. Sorry, to our attendees and come back next week when the show is going to be talking about going back to school and how we engage faculty to use collaborative annotation. So again, thank you everyone and come back next week.


In July and August of 2022, unprecedented and long-lasting heat waves hit central and eastern China, CEC. These extreme temperatures were caused by anomalous anticyclones in the mid-upper troposphere over northern CEC, which brought cold and dry air from the south, resulting in sinking motions and extreme heat waves. In contrast, in August, the heat waves were more severe due to a powerful anticyclonic condition over CEC, which was superimposed on an extreme silk road pattern, SRP, and the effects of northwest-south Asian diabetic heat. This resulted in simultaneous extreme weather events across the Eurasian continent. This article was authored by Ziqin Wang, Haolin Luo, and Song Yang.