hello everyone the festive season has begun and here to stay with it has come time to give your home and office a makeover so let's create some festive decor to make them beautiful and the DIY RGB LED Lenten is a perfect fit for making the Lenten you'll need a Vive and HC05 Bluetooth module a relay RGB LED strips a bulb a bulb holder corrugated sheets bolts a thread electric wires and some jumper cables let's begin first take two corrugated sheets of different colors and cut two squares of size 17 centimeter from each sheet next paste two different colored sheets together using hot glue similarly paste the other two sheets this will act as the top and the base of our Lenten now let's make the structure of our Lenten draw a square of 15 by 15 centimeter on the top and bottom sheets take one of the sheets and mark four holes 7.5 centimeter apart from each other inside the marked square for mounting evive this will be the base then draw a line in the center of the square and make two holes at 5 and 10 centimeter these holes are for passing the thread to hang your Lenten repeat the process for the top to one centimeter slit offset at one corner of both the top and the base for passing the electrical wire take the base and paste four equilateral triangles of side 15 centimeter along the sides of the square month next take four squares of side 15 centimeter and paste them between two adjacent triangles finally take four more equilateral triangles of side 15 centimeter and fix it onto the top and the square corrugated sheet we'll see that the Lenten is getting its shape draw a circle of 1.5 centimeter radius at the center of the top and cut it out for housing the bulk holder pass a thread carefully through the first hole on top and then through the first hole of the base then pass it back to the other hole of the base and then through the second hole of the top next attach evive to the base using 10 mm m3 bolts pass the bolts through the base and match the mounting holes on evive correspondingly pass two wires through the one centimeter slots on the top and the base now let's add the wheel take a piece of the electrical wire and connect the black wire to the comb and the red wire to the end of pin of the wheel to the base using double sided tape now take four 15 plus five centimeter strips of corrugated sheets and paste them to the top hold it through the circle cut on the top and connect the wires to the bulk holder now take the free end of the red wire connected to the relay and the red wire of another electrical wire and connect them to the bulk holder then take both the black wires and connect them together thus making the ground common next fix the bulb into the bulk holder finally paste the top using hot glue now let's add the RGB LED strips at the base take one strip and sold the three jumper cables to it repeat the process for another strip paste the RGB strip on a small piece of corrugated sheet paste two RGB LED strips leaving 5 centimeter from both sides on a 17 by 6 centimeter strip using hot glue repeat for the remaining three sides of the base once done paste the strips to the base now that the structure of our lantern is ready let's make the connections connect the hc05 bluetooth module to the header given on eval now let's connect relay connect the signal pin to evives digital pin 10 connect VCC to plus 5 volt connects ground to ground let's make the connections for the RGB LED strip connect evives VCC ground and signal pins to the breadboard as shown now let's connect the RGB strip connect the VCC pin of the strip to the breadboard then connect the ground pin then connect the signal pin similarly connect the rest of these strips in parallel by referring to the fridging diagram now let's write the code and pick the box you can download it from the link given in the description box we are going to write it in the upload mode the when evive starts up head block will ensure that the code starts executing when evive starts up since we are going to use double to control the lantern will use the blocks from the double palette to write the code you can download the app from the link given in the description box first set the bluetooth board rate according to your requirements by default the relay should be in the off state and the RGB strips should be initialized thus click on the add extension palette and add the lighting extension the first thing we need to control is the bulb if the command received from devil's terminal module is on then the relay should turn on which in turn will switch on the bulb command is off then the relay should be off thus turning off the bulb next we need to control the patterns of the LED strip you can add as many patterns as you want in our case the strip will turn red upon typing red upon typing green yellow upon typing yellow blue upon typing blue upon typing rainbow now that the code is complete upload it to evive using the upload code button and watch the lantern light up the way you want it to on be special don't forget to share with your friends to light up the Diwali and give this video a thumbs up if you have anything that you'd like us to make next let us know in the comment section below and for more such exciting DIY projects subscribe to STEMpedia and follow us on Facebook Instagram and Twitter


So, to find the perimeter of this thing, let's break it up into kind of three distinct parts. One part for the perimeter would be these two sides of a triangle. Another part would be these two lengths of a rectangle. And then the last part would be half of the circumference of a circle. So the two little red pieces, the two parts of the triangle, plus the two lengths of a rectangle, and then add to that half of a circle, half of the circumference of a circle. Now the reason we're finding circumference is because we're asked for the perimeter of this shape. So, for the two sides of the triangle, since we've got six here and these congruence marks, tell us that both of those are six. We have two lengths that are six units apiece. And we'll add to that the two lengths, the blue lengths, that were both 19. I kind of wrote over it, but there are two lengths that are 19 units long. And then we have to add half of the circumference of a circle. Now remember circumference of a circle. Circumference of a circle is two times pi times r, two times pi times the radius. Now the radius of this half circle would be this length, which corresponds with this length. In other words, it would be half of six, which is three units. So circumference of the whole circle would be two pi times three. In other words, it's six pi. However, we don't want a full circle. We just want half of a circle. And so we want half of six pi. And so two times six, of course, is 12. Two times 19 is 38. And half of six pi, of course, is just three pi. And so a final answer, an exact answer, we would take 12 and 38, add those together, which would be 50 plus three pi. And that would be our final answer in terms of exact numbers. And if instead we were asked for an approximation, you can take 50 plus three pi, plug it into your calculator, and that gives you about 59.425 units. So that's the perimeter. And just to recap, we took the two little pieces of the triangle plus the two lengths of the rectangle plus half the circumference of the circle. So that's the perimeter. The next problem deals with the area of the same shape. Now to find the area, we're going to do something kind of similar, but we're going to be a little bit devious about how we figure out removing this little triangle. So let's game plan this out. So we could think of the end cap as the area of a semicircle, which refers to this piece. And then we could add in one of the rectangles. In other words, this large, let's color it blue. Add in one of these blue rectangles. So add a rectangle. But then we'll have to cut out the area of one of these triangles. So what that looks like, we'll subtract one of the green triangles. So the area of half of a circle, well, I know the area of one full circle is pi times r squared. And in the previous slide, we saw that the radius of this circle is 3. So the area of the full circle would be pi times 3 squared or 9 pi. However, we want half of a circle. And so we want half of 9 pi. And we'll add to that the area of one full rectangle. And that rectangle, its dimensions are 19 for a length by 6 for a width. So 19 times 6. And then we want to subtract the area of one square. Pardon me, subtract the area of a triangle. Now I know that this triangle is an equilateral triangle. And so its area, we could find using one fourth times side squared times root 3. In other words, one fourth times a side length was 6, 6 squared squared 3, and 6 squared is 36. So we have 36 fourths root 3. And 36 fourths can simplify one step further to 9. So we have 9 squared root 3. So that's the area of our rectangle. So we have minus 9 squared root 3. And now, we can do some simplification to get an exact answer. Half of 9 pi would be, well we could call it 9 halves pi, plus 19 times 6 is 114 minus 9 root 3. And that, my friends, would be an exact answer as strange as it looks. But we have a pi, a common, or a constant number in a square root 3. And then you plug that whole business into the calculator to get an approximate answer of 143.726 square units.


And now, stay tuned for the program that has rated tops in popularity for a longer period of time than any other West Coast program in radio history. The Signal Oil Program, The Whistler. Signal, the famous Go Farther gasoline.  I am The Whistler, and I know many things for I walk by night. I know many strange tales hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows. Yes, I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak. And now, for the Signal Oil Company, The Whistler's strange story, The Golden Penny. The tall lean young man's throat up the gravel path with an easy gait. And now standing on the crest of the hill, he had reached his goal, the Tremont Mansion. After five years of searching, he was certain that Tremonts, Rodney Tremont in particular, were exactly suited to his needs. He stepped up to the flagstone entrance, walked to the door, and pushed the button. Yes, sir. I'm Bertram Lowen. Mr. Tremont is expecting me. Oh, yes, come in, sir. This way, he's in the library. Thank you. Mr. Tremont, Mr. Lowen, sir. Oh, yes, Lowen, come in, come in. I'll be off in a while, sir. Very well, sir. Well, put down, Lowen. Now then, we'll get to you in a moment, but first, what do you know about me? Your name is Rodney Tremont. You apparently have a lot of money. You have a 65-foot yacht named The Golden Penny. And you want someone to run it for you. Tell me, Lowen, are you always this direct? Always. That's good, good. All right, now let me fill in some of the things you don't know about me. The columnists like to refer to me as a playboy, a fortune-hunter, who found one and married it. I don't believe half that I see or anything that I hear. Oh, the columnists have me pegged just about right, but they only suggest that I'm a heel. By some standards, of course, I am. Are you a heel, too, Lowen? By some standards. Now, I guess we've reached one point of understanding. You let us have your experience to navigation. Know all about diesel engines. Well, that gives you an edge on me. I don't know the first thing about engines, and I don't want to learn. Being skipper of The Golden Penny will be your job. Do I have the job? Let's see here. Where can I put you later? Oh, here it is. Diesel engineer, navigator, single, 35. Take off in the 70s. Ex-football star. Big game hunter and guide. Expert on skis. You do just about everything. Poker, bridge, rummy, checkers. Everything except the one thing that's most important, Lowen. You mean chess, of course. I do. Well, I didn't mention chess because, you see, I'm almost unbeatable at poker, bridge, rummy, and checkers. I'm a chess. I am unbeatable. I'll consider that a challenge, Lowen, and I'll accept it right now. Come on up. I'm sorry, dear. I didn't know you had a guest. Sorry, Pat. This is Mr. Lowen. I spoke to you about him. Oh, yes. How do you do, Mr. Lowen? Well, there are a lot of applications, right? You sound just like Richard Halliburton, only more so. Have you written any books? Oh, I'm sorry. I haven't. I really can't abide your, Mr. Lowen. Deep sea fishing boards meet a death, and I load chess. Honestly, sometimes I'm hard put to understand just why Rodney did marry me. I've told you, Pat. It was your money. Of course. I remember now. Don't take her seriously, Lowen. What she isn't telling you is that she's already hired a companion. Oh, well, now, dear, it's quite another story. Dear, it's my secretary as well, Mr. Lowen, and I do need one I'm not the well-organized type at all. Besides Rodney, I've never seen you leave the room when she comes in. But forgive us. We're not quarreling, really. This is just our unique way of blending. I'm sure it is. Do hire this man, Rodney. I like him. See you later. Thank you, Mrs. Fremont. See you dinner, Pat. Well, now that the hurricane has blown itself out, Chester was all set up. I make my best decisions on the outcome of a chess game. Give you a supporting chance. If you beat me, you're hired. He's a strange man, Rodney Fremont, isn't he, Bert? Not quite what you'd expected. You're certain he's just what he said. A fortune hunter who found one and married it. He interests you because, in a way, you're very much alike, except Rodney's ten years older. You wonder if he's ten years wiser. His chess is far better than you thought it would be. But finally, after an hour or so, you make one last conclusive move. Checkmate? Brilliant, Lohan. Brilliant. Beautiful game. I'm glad you like it. You're doing yourself a job, you know. You think you can stand it here? I think I can. The day I can't, I'll just steal your yacht and silently sail away. I'll bet you a word of that. Excuse me, Mr. Fremont. Oh, excuse me. But Mrs. Fremont says then it will be ready in half an hour. We finished our game just in time, Lohan. Adelia, this is Bertram Lohan. Is it Ramsey? Mrs. Fremont's secretary extraordinary. Ramsey, dear good girl, dear. Show Bertram his quarters, will you? I have a call to make before dinner. Of course. Did you get the job? I did. You've cased the deal very well up here. I'm proud of you. Don't underestimate him. He's smart. Fremont? I know. You're sure he's got a hundred grand of his own? She gave it to him as a wedding present. She's very proud of herself for it. Told me all about it. As he mentioned it. Told me all about it, too. He's very proud of himself. I won't talk anymore now. Better show me to my quarters, hmm? We'll talk later.  She's done a good job of advance work on the Fremont. You've got to move slowly now, cautiously. And the first few weeks go along quickly and pleasantly. After a while you begin to wonder when Delia's going to make her next move. And then one night late, after Mrs. Fremont has retired. You walk under the terrace for one last cigarette before turning in. What? Excuse me. It's all right. It's only Bert. Sorry? I didn't expect to see you. Well, obviously we didn't expect to see you either. If you'll excuse me, I think I'll go in now. I do believe you've unsettled Delia, Bert. Looks like it. Anyway, now you know. Look, I told you when I first came I believe only half I see. Nothing I hear. I'm counting on that. Might be wise for you and Delia to show an interest in one another. Might throw Mrs. Fremont off the track. You think she suspects? Hmm. Just a precaution. Until I decide what to do. You start seeing Delia right away. You wonder what the two of them are up to, Delia in particular. Wonder whether she's with you or against you. It could be a perfect setup for murder, Bert. For with Mrs. Fremont out of the way, Delia and Rodney would have millions instead of thousands.  And the next day you get your chance. The two of you are alone in the library. I'm sorry about last night, Bert. Just a weak moment, I guess. Nothing more. What's it like kissing four million dollars? Any better than this? Nothing's better than that. Okay. Look, what's the deal between you and Fremont? I told you not to work too fast or go too far. And I told you it was just a weak moment. That's all. How would he look to you if Mrs. Fremont suddenly out of the way? Do you want him? And four million bucks? I don't want him in ten minutes. I'm just following orders. Remember, Chief? I was supposed to interest him, wasn't I? Fremont isn't the kind of a dope who goes into a huddle with himself and cooks up a murder. Not even for millions. Bert, for heaven's sake, who said anything about... Murder? I did. Don't get me wrong, kid.  Poison ones taken separately when Fremont are harmless.  I know all about dark cellars. I'm sure you do.  But if we work it my way, we can get the golden penny and his hundred grand. That's what I want. What do you want, did you? You think we can swing it your way? With you as bait? Yeah. But get this murderers out, it's sloppy, tedious. My plans keep everything clean. I'll play it smooth. And remember, the heavy emotion is out, too. I know how well you can play the role of a temptress. Just don't overdo it. That's better, Bert. For a while there, I thought you'd forgotten. Varnish is fine stuff in its place, that is, as a finish for woodwork. But when varnish accumulates on parts inside your car's motor, it can do real harm.  Yet that's exactly what happens when ordinary motor oils break down under heat. That's why Signal Oil Company brought out Signal Premium Compounded Motor Oil, an extra-duty lubricant scientifically engineered to do two important jobs which ordinary oils can't do. One, to keep from breaking down and forming varnish even under extreme heat. And secondly, to dissolve out any accumulated varnish which other motor oils may already have deposited. By protecting your motor in these two extra ways, Signal Premium Oil keeps that like-new power and zing in your car, keeps down gas and oil consumption and repair bills. That's why it's just good business to make your next oil change, a change to this extra-duty Signal Oil that does so much more than just lubricate. Change to Signal Premium Motor Oil at a Signal service station. Everything seems calm again, doesn't it Bert? After you set Delia straight. And once more, you feel certain that before too long, you'll make the golden penny in Rodney Tremont's $100,000 all your own. You've carefully schooled Delia on how to handle Rodney in front of Mrs. Tremont. And he's responded just as you felt he would. With Delia cooling, Rodney can't hide his feelings about her. And Mrs. Tremont is upset. All this according to your plan.  She asked you to join her in the Rose Garden. I don't really like the way I'm handling this, Mr. Lone.  Especially your chess game. Does he ever beat you? I let him win every fourth game to keep it interesting. Oh my, it's so good to laugh. It's just a tonic to have you around, Mr. Lone. Just a tonic. What can I say? Well, you could say that I'm just a fool, Mr. Lone, because that's what I am. A fool in love with a younger man. A wonderful nobody. That is, he used to be wonderful. Now, I'm not so sure.  That he's... Indeed. Is that what's on your mind, Mrs. Tremont? I bless your heart, your husband's as straight as an arrow. He wouldn't consider any other woman, did he? She's just a kid and a child. Believe me, Mrs. Tremont, I know Rodney and I have discussed women by the hour. No, ma'am, you haven't a thing to worry about. Mr. Lone, you've made me very happy. There he is, lovely and such a comfort. I do hope it can stay that way. Oh, it can, and it will, Mrs. Tremont. You know, I think I know exactly what the situation needs. Really? Fine. I'm willing to do anything, you know? Well, if I could talk Rod into leaving you... What? For just a few weeks, Cruz. Cruz would do wonders for that restless feeling of his. It's all it is, you know? You know what they say about absence, Mrs. Tremont?  That's a promise. You know, Mr. Lone, I believe you're right. This devotion to diesels is beyond me. What's that thing you're fussing with now? Oh, this? It's called the gravity tank. Oh. Fuel goes from here right into the fuel injection system. It does, huh? Well, it's all great to me.  I know more about diesels than I do about women. No, but with me it's just the reverse. Thanks, ever. Funny, now that I think about it, they have more in common than you'd think. Both of them look simple, act complicated, stand up under heavy pressure, fuel the pieces of a little thing. Well, what? True of women, anyway. Although I can't imagine any little thing that would follow up that constant of an engine. A little thing like, like sugar would do it. Really? Sugar in the gravity tank. That manual there will tell you that it'd create a mess that diesel expert couldn't fix for hours, days, maybe. Believe me, I'll take your word for it. It's enough for me to know that too much sugar and women don't make it. Now, can't we give the engine a rest just bracing it here, anchoring my own harbor, too much like treading water when I really want to be in the swim? It's in good shape. If we ever do decide to go anywhere. What was that you were saying last night about some island in the Caribbean? Oh, huh. Like I said, the days run from Kingston. That's in Jamaica. Perfect for you, indeed. Trapical fruits, bubbling springs of clear, cool water, and fishing. Man, you've never seen anything like it. Small, sheltered harbor. Perfect anchoring. How big is it? About 10 square miles. Is it inhabited? Sure. Monkeys. Smart monkeys, though. They live like kings. The days run from Kingston. Shouldn't take too long to get there, then? Not too long. But then with me, it's just a dream because I haven't got the money, the yacht, or Delia. You've got them all, Rod. Rodney falls for a dozen rebirths just as Mrs. Tremont did, but for different reasons. You convinced him that he has all it takes, the money, the yacht, and Delia. Delia carries out her part perfectly. You've got the money, the yacht, and Delia. Delia carries out her part perfectly. She's quit.  But you and Rodney know she'll be waiting to board the golden penny at your first stop down the coast. It wasn't easy, but you finally managed to convince Rodney that this trip might be just the beginning of a cruise that could take him anywhere. That he'll be so happy with Delia he may never want to return to Mrs. Tremont. In that case, he'll want to take the fortune of $100,000 with him. And it lasts when the money is in the wall safe of the master cabin. You put to sea. You refuel at the port of San Juan and stock the galley to your liking. Because from here on it's your cruise, isn't it, Bert? Delia keeps Rodney sufficiently occupied, going ashore, seeing the sights. And he pays no attention at all to what you do. You leave San Juan long before dawn. But it's late morning before Rodney appears. And he seems quite excited. Bert, are Thompson and Miller with you? The mechanic and the deckhand. Where are they? I've looked all over for them. I dismissed them in San Juan. Told them I wouldn't need them anymore. Why? I don't want them in my way. I don't want anyone in my way, Rod. Not you, not anyone. Oh. That's it. You dismissed the crew, now you're going to get rid of me, I suppose. Then you'll have the yacht, the money.  Easy does it, Rod. What's wrong? I've been looking for the deckhand. There's not a sign of the crew anywhere. Rod just mentioned that too. I told him easy does it. What I'm going to do will be easy, believe me. Hey, Rod. Think a minute.  You're going to have to use the ship's engines or about navigation. The ocean current we're in right now will eventually deposit you in the equatorial comms. Death would be slow there. But the galley's loaded. We'd be picked up in time. With a temperature at 120 day and night, you'd be at each other's throats in three days. You devil. You've planned this all along. Oh, please, both of them. Oh, and don't forget the sudden squalls in that area. It takes an expert to ride them out, even under power shots in those waters, too. Here we go. Rod, please. I'm frightened. All right, all right. How much do you want, Bert? Take the yacht. No. The yacht and $50,000. Only take Deely and me back to San Juan.  Replace it with a straight scotch. You'll need it. Why didn't you take the yacht and the money last night? You had the chance. Deely and I were ashore in San Juan. How much? You... Oh. It's Deely you want. That's up to Deely. She can come along with me if she wants to. You see, you underestimate me, Rod. Any chess player knows that's bad. The insurance company has blueprints of this yacht. It's custom-made, very distinctive. I'd be picked up at the first court. Then what do you intend to do? You might have known. I'd give you a sporting chance. How is your chess game today, Rod? Is that your idea of a sporting chance? That's right. One game. Winner take all. The yacht, the contents of the safe. And Deely. Well, I like that. Me, part of a chess game. The queen, my dear. But this is no time for chivalry. You could lose, you know, Bert. I do. You give me fare back to the states. But if I win, you give me a bill of sale of the golden penny and a signed statement that I won the money in a game of skill. A deal. All the deal I can expect, I guess. All right, Bert, you're on. Good. Take the wheel, Deely. I would know what to do with it, and you know it. Okay. Just cut the engine and heave, too. This is it, isn't it, Bert? Everything just the way you planned it. You're confident that the two of you set up the chess game right there in the pilot house. Deely, now, open me your ally. Watch as silently as the game progresses. After more than an hour, you have Rod exactly where you want him. He doesn't look too good for me, does he? But I beat you once before when you had me like this, remember? Mm-hmm. It took eight hours and a long walk around the estate between plays to do it. How about giving me 15 minutes and a walk around the deck this time? Sure. Go ahead. 15 minutes it is. If you aren't back and moved in that time, though. Then I'll concede the game is yours. 15 minutes, then. I'll be right here waiting for you. Time's up, according to my watch. Well? Look, Bert, and I know it. Best man won and all that sort of thing. He is the best man, isn't he, Deely? I think so, Rod. He sure had me fooled. Both of you. Well... I don't think so. I don't think so, Rod. I don't think so. Well... Hand me that pen and paper from the desk, and I'll make this piracy on the high seas legal. This... is to... certify... that I, Rodney... Cremont... for value... received... to sell... to Bert from... Lowen... my yacht... the... golden... penny... and all... Decent of you to offer me the shoreboat. And five gallons of gas. Don't forget. Only way to get rid of you. All right, in you go. Thank you. I'll help lower you. Good. You say if I head you south from here, I'll hit San Juan? Can't miss it by more than six inches. Bon voyage. Thanks. Well, goodbye. And no hard feelings, huh? Ha ha. Are you kidding? Of course not. In a recent newspaper article, you may have read about a test conducted by one of the heaviest makes of cars on the market to prove that you get both increased and outstanding performance when a motor runs efficiently. Two stock cars, each weighing more than 4,000 pounds and carrying four passengers averaged over 20 miles per gallon of gasoline with the most brilliant performing motor this automobile has ever had. Well, friends, isn't this just more proof of what I've been saying all along about today's signal gasoline because it's engineered to help your motor run more efficiently than the good mileage which has made signal famous from Canada to Mexico as the go farther gasoline. In addition, you enjoy the quick starting, the proud pickup and the smooth, quiet power that's possible only with a gasoline that helps your motor deliver its most efficient performance which explains why more and more drivers who demand more from their automobiles as well as their motoring dollars are switching to signal the famous go farther gasoline. Well, Bert, it's over. You and Delia stand arm in arm on the deck of the Golden Penny, peering out onto the horizon until the shore boat bearing Rodney Tremont to San Juan becomes a speck on the South Atlantic and then disappears entirely. Everything's gone just as you planned, hasn't it, Bert? The Golden Penny, the contents of the cabin safe in Delia. They're all yours now just as you knew they would be. Now you're certain the ports of the world are yours too so just enter and leave whenever you like. Oh goodness, where did that wind come from? Don't know. Uh-oh. That sky to the north and east. Oh, it's so black, Bert. The storm all right, a lulu. Now we can ride it out, no use trying to run from it. Have to head into it at full power. I'll get it started. Oh, Bert, will it be all right? Well, baby, only hurry along now. We don't get to 65 footer under way I'm frightened, Bert, after everything we did to Rod. You know, never make it to San Juan at the rate this thing's blowing up. You'd better off with me, baby, and Mr. Diesel's pet invention. Ah, here we go now. See, baby? You got nothing to worry about. Oh, thank heaven. We'll make it now, hit at full power. What is it? What's wrong? I don't know. Wait a minute. It doesn't seem to be getting any fuel, funny. I'm going to take a look at the fuel line. It's sugar. What? Sugar, lots of it, and the gravity tank. Oh, Bert, look, they're on the floor, that book. There's a note on it. They're giving me 15 minutes, and that tip about sugar. This was the only move I could think of, and your manual on diesel engines was most helpful. I'm taking the money from the safe, too. From what you said about these waters, I don't think you'll have much use for money. Goodbye. And no hard feelings, huh? Let that whistle be your signal for the signal oil program The Whistler each Sunday night at this same time. Signal Oil Company has asked me to remind you, now that school days are here again, it's even more important to drive at sensible speeds, be courteous, and obey traffic regulations. It may save a life, possibly a child. Teacher in tonight's story were Bill Foreman, Lamont Johnson, and Barry Kroger. The Whistler was produced by George Allen, directed by Robert Hafter, with story by Jack Conrad, music by Wilbur Hatch, and was transmitted to our troops overseas by the Armed Forces Radio Service. The Whistler is entirely fictional, and all characters portrayed on The Whistler are also fictional. Any similarity of names or resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Remember at this same time next Sunday, another strange tale by The Whistler. Marvin Miller speaking for the Signal Oil Company. This is CBS, the Columbia Broadcasting System.


I think we could start a new trend because actually I have to say that aside from the movies we've been seeing at the theaters this year which are absolutely transcendent completely generally our collection, our hard drive collection is like about a million times better than the average run-of-the-day movies that come out and most of them don't even come close in terms of the mind-training value So you've got like the classics we call them that Like each time you watch them.  I mean I have to say literally that with a lot of the movies and movie watchers guy and a lot of other movies I've Probably watched some of them probably 10 20 times maybe more maybe some of them 25 times I have to tell you the value is enormous this idea of I've seen that movie before It doesn't apply metaphysically It would be like going into a meditation saying I've done this before We don't really need to meditate again. I've done that Go shopping or do something other activity like it's an activity Movie watching with the spirit when you really give it over to spirit is not really an activity It's actually it's like a rinsing of your mind And more than that it's like a reminder of these very deep principles That are acted out and you know back in the day 2,000 years ago Jesus did most of his teachings in public with parables because the mind might say Wasn't even nearly ready to To comprehend or to even be touched by the depth of what he was actually speaking about so he would Frequently Preface his parables with for those that have the ears to hear and let them hear he had to say that really over and over and over as he was speaking of a wisdom and death depths that was covered over by so many layers of Darkness that even though they were gems People would just have to kind of take in whatever They were ready to take in and you know and that's why you can read the parables over and over you can even the prodigal son Parable which is one of the favorite ones that he taught over and over with You know to really gain the full meaning of that that that really is what of course miracle is talking about thinking you've thrown away your inheritance of the king of heaven and You've lost your way completely and you're completely lost and you have such unworthiness that you don't Have you don't feel the worthiness to even go back to go back home. And so you know you You finally in the parable.  I guess he finally compares himself to his father servants thinking Maybe I can go back and at least have food because he's very hungry starving And that starts the journey back after it gets so extreme And that parable was taught over and over and over isn't teaching parable but I'd say these movies this what you'll see today is a classic and I know some Summertime movie theater theaters. I know it's all like city. There's a century 16 and they They actually show some of the classics as a world would judge classics like dirty dancing. It was just showing there Patrick's way see that bringing back the classics.  It's a great soundtrack and it's a great story and And yet the movies we call our classics They're classics because they have such deep metaphysical value that I'd say every time you watch one of them If you watch it with openness and receptivity, you can see new things That you've never seen before so it doesn't really apply that you've seen the movie before Because you you have a deeper readiness every time you watch it and then you can actually You know really see so to speak you can get into deeper meanings with The ultimate which is accepting the atonement, you know, it's each time you watch a movie if you Have a willingness you can be taken deep down toward the atonement toward the correction in your own mind And really that's the only point Of anything there's really no other point Do anything on earth earth doesn't have a point living your time doesn't really have a point But the point would be to accept the atonement and then if you see the value in these then Then you could you know You could set up like almost like regular classic movies for regular rinsings of your mind I have to say most people who are into spirituality they They put more time into bathing and cleaning their teeth than they do Into rinsing their mind On a regular basis and it's available You know so you could do it. So there's nothing holding you back From such rinsing. So this movie Is just a classic and it's funny because it's the way it works. I was just a few days ago They had all these at this thing on yahoo about where are these stars now that were big in the The 80s and one of them was Bridget Fonda I was like, oh, yeah because frequently these stars get used In some really classic movies little Buddha So if you haven't seen it, Bridget Fonda plays the Mother in little Buddha and this would this this that one in this one are probably two of her all-time classic metaphysical movies To to be a classic metaphysical movie doesn't necessarily mean it's going to do out the box office or that'll be acclaimed in the world in fact Probably Tom Hanks top Movie of all time metaphysically. He says was the worst movie that he ever made so It's this there's the depth beyond The common everyday perceptions go versus the volcano We just had a powerful mini movie that was made and that was Tom Hanks He's come right out in public. It said that's the worst movie. He couldn't even believe that he would make such a movie But you know, if you look at it, you know, Steven Spielberg Kathleen Kennedy took two of the biggest names of movies and producers are there and Meg Ryan playing all these characters, you know, and then he was probably just saying it was in his eyes probably like a dorky movie, but The profundity Is there It wasn't really And that's what you know Kevin Costner said about uh field of dreams. They all all the actors at the time, you know Okay, we'll take a chance. It was like a risk to do a movie like that They were prepared for bomb dud and it just Became what the world would say a classic. It just had his 25th anniversary, but that's why I remind everybody that I've said it for years and I actually saw it in the course about a week ago that the world is backwards and upside down I always just said it so often that I thought that I thought oh Jesus We think alike, you know Okay, backwards and upside down. What would you do if you found yourself in a strange land?  What makes it a classic? Well It's based on a what the world called true story So it's one of these things like just recently in the springtime.  He was on he was on the operating table But he had all these encounters with Jesus and angels and You know, amazing things and then the presence to just speak it That's what's so great about heaven is for real if you haven't seen it. It's it's amazing. It's been an amazing string of movies this year both metaphysical and God's not dead Heaven is for real. It's just starting to flood in I actually have to say there's we've had a major string of classics Going all the way back to the end of last year which is about time It's just like boom home run after home run like go Sometimes X-men you wait they're coming up at our movie Retreat that we're having in September beginning of september But sometimes we would wait for like seems like months or years for the big home run Oh, it's good. It's a double. It's a triple. But then boom. Oh got to go see it You know, it's like one after the next after the next Like Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron taking back Boom They're just home run after home run metaphysically speaking This is like a reflection of our mind Because it's no there aren't really movie makers and producers directors actresses. It's just our mind is like ready And you know, we got taste there in 1998 99 right at the end of the millennium with Truman show and You know matrix and 13th floor amazing Metaphysical movies kind of heralding. They were like They were like heralding the coming of of a new era This is the darling of the age of Aquarius Age of Aquarius Aquarius Movie wise speaking your image you are harming an understanding This is this is what Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis jr. Were forecasting back, you know in the 70s the late 60s in the 70s This is it. You're you're in the dawning of the age of Aquarius and So these movies are coming out pretty regularly, but but then we have a whole collection of classics Which taken by themselves, you know You know, you could Easily those are 52 weeks in a year. It's like the course is 365 days. You could come up with a 52 week Mindwash That would absolutely blow your mind away because the classics have that much power You know, it's the law of the movies that come out. You know, they're just You know, they're just not worth seeing actually. They're not not they're not worthy of your time Your time can be spent so much constructively and extending the message And and these parables now that you're kind of have the gateway into the inroads of it I know that's one of the key is there are ways of teaching is with the movies. It's like you've got best tools best tools you could ever imagine and and It's so easy to teach with the movies because people think of them as movies like, oh And then it's like come closer Like uh, Rafiki, you know the monkey You know in In line can come closer look again Oh, I see no movie. Look again You really haven't And I'm sure like this is going to be a gem for nakita because it's it's one of the all time greats But but for some of you have seen it can happen to you, you know, you just you feel the heart swirling your heart bursting with joy because it contrasts The thinking of the world with the thinking of the spirit and movies Some movies can do that so well field of dreams If you build it, he will come it was all about guidance And yet it wasn't talked about his guidance. It was talked about this whispering voice Which made it much more acceptable publicly There's anything religious or anything at connotations of you know spirit or whatever You know, it took you in so gently that you just were like with it every frame every step of the way And even people who have a huge resistance to spirituality or Christianity or religion Would not be offended with that movie. They would be like, oh Gosh, that was a good movie. They walk out of the theater. Wow, that was great It it has to come in a way that they can receive it And that's why people get turned off of church. They just have so many connotations in their mind They don't see church like we talked about in the Keenan High as a state of mind. They see it as a theology And there's a lot of the theology that they they think is hypocritical They wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. They'll never go back there again They have no interest in ever stepping foot in a church again You know church attendance for for decades has been on huge decline Because people can think of they think there's so many other things that are much more interesting And much more exciting than going to church That's how I thought of it when I was a boy So anything I could avoid It goes in there and I'd sit they'd sit me down in the wood hardwood pew and I'd be Looking at the window and trying to think But if I didn't know that there was this kind of church I'd have been the first one. I'd been in the front row In the soft seat in the soft seat like ready to go And asking questions of the minister What did that mean? What did that mean? I just Excited curiosity, you know because that would have this would have been the greatest church there is and now that we've discovered it Why not use it? No, it's great. We have a church service here, but it's like Why not 52 weeks a year, you know, you could You know, that's partly why I think during the consolidation that there's this talk of buying a movie theater You know it kind of sprang up in the kitchen and Yeah, I mean I was starting to get links sent to me Of movie theaters. It's like they were serious about you know, yeah Really, that's our next day. We can trade in the monastery. You can you know Because it was part of this outreach like I want I want everyone in the universe to feel the same feelings I'm feeling I want everyone to have the same Access to this joy. I want to give it away It's just this feeling is not a place It's not a place You know, Jesus says the holiest spot on earth is where an ancient hatred has become a present love That that's what lights it up is that Feeling in your heart and just that's the feeling with the movies. You can you can give it away So as I said it now I'll get to the setup That was a preamble It wasn't a setup So We have Bridget Fonda playing a waitress in New York City We have Isaac Hayes the great Isaac Hayes You know from music He's kind of like your your angelic like your homeless angelic figure That's in it You have Nicholas Cage Bridget Fonda and now Nicholas Cage. He's been in a lot of our Uh metaphysical movies a lot of our classics are Nicholas play Nicholas Cage classics He's a cop And he's a cop in New York City. He's got a wonderful partner and His partner is always kind of like smiling and at him and just shaking his head because Nicholas Cage plays a cop who wants to do the right thing He wants to be kind to people. He wants to be friendly to people. He wants to be honest He wants to be respectful. He's not the kind of cop Band cop like in the lake Trying to like Liam Nielsen the voice of the put the screws on everybody, you know, really so he's he's He wants to be the good cop and he's got his Things going on, but he's generally it's based on true stories. So to speak where he's generally he's He's married. He goes out to do his job, but he he loves his job he loves to go out in the streets and be helpful and And he's married to a woman who who is like greedy Self-centered Egotistical in almost all kinds of ways and it's just a very interesting pair of vibrationally It couldn't be farther apart. You know, she's married to him and and he and yet again when you're in the state of mind Like he's in he demonstrated He wants to be friendly to all of new york city and he's very patient And extremely kind with his wife As you would expect, you know, it doesn't matter the way people seem to be in the world It's the how you perceive them is based on where you heard it.  That's all he's got But he's so present that he realizes he and everything slows down for him because he's really connecting with the waitress and he He doesn't have his wallet and he it's like and he he can't give her a tip So that's what starts to set up this real life story of of of him Basically giving her the option. I think maybe a coming back the next day and Doubling the tip or something like that or half Oh, what he's got on him is a lottery ticket Where half Half of the lottery ticket or something like that. I think and then she goes she's got and she's got her glasses always sliding down He's like wanting to help her Fix her glasses so that they don't always slide down.  Oh, I think I'll take half of the winnings at the lottery ticket So anyway, he he makes a promise and that's another good thing about this movie It's like, you know, we talk a lot about integrity and really truly if you go deep enough integrities of the mind That's why you need all these forgiveness opportunities. That's why you need Mind training movies and having your mind constantly rinsed because the only way you ever experience integrity is in the mind you'll never Behavior doesn't exist apart from the mind. Everything is mentioned So you can't really have it be had an integrist personality Even though that's just it's a good symbol Say he's definitely Has that but we're talking about such a deep calling of integrity in the mind where everything you think and say and do and feel And believe and perceive everything like the levels of mind are in total alignment So you're totally aligned with god Aligned the spirit. That's what we're going for.  He lies to his boss.  But in this movie, you know, she's going to be like, how could she Cannot actually believe she plays a great extreme character Whether you got this guy that's got a really big heart He's patient. He's kind. He's always trying to do the right thing and then his wife He is putting into the test. She's like giving him Testing that poking poking He can sometimes be so peaceful and relaxed that she it just drives her crazy She just because he's too peaceful.  She wants him. She can't believe That he doesn't have a better job For him, he loves his job and for her it's despicable He could do so much better So much better for them as a couple and he's got this job where he's out trying to be Loving and kind to everybody So the other thing I like about this movie is that's the thing about some of these rare true stories is Other media gets involved Whenever you have the media involved, all it does is it magnifies everything You know, it is like that seen from Back a while where it was that that oj simpson Chase where he's in this white suv and I mean the whole nation nobody can let the babies cry Let the whole world fall apart Everybody's gotta be glued to the tv to watch the police chasing a white suv in la What's the you know Nothing there's not such a big news and then when they caught him and then everybody is he guilty Oh everybody had to have an opinion and then when they ran the trial it went off That's the beginning of reality tv That was the beginning of what we call today Kim cartizen and all these realities he shows that was it right there Cameras everywhere following a white suv. Well, that's what I like about this movie This movie's got such a great teaching, but it would be like following jesus around with the media today Media coverage on miracles media coverage on On how people everything is magnified how people handle it Because you have an extreme case where the waitress and the cop You know of the lorry things start to fall in love and the wife and then the media And everything gets ultimately magnified in the media which which simply drags home the lessons even more You know people say That was perhaps a bloody mess the crucifixion and all the point of the crucifixion was it was an extreme teaching example In absolute defenselessness in absolute innocence In any of you have seen any of the jesus movies including son of god the recent one you see that that presence Contrasted with the world The seeming viciousness of the world it's so cool when that Loving kindness and that presence comes together with the The extreme viciousness of the world and it gets that's what I like about this it gets vicious And the media gets involved everything gets blown up and gets magnified And that's another thing that makes this movie a classic is because if it was just a simple story told It would be very very very impactful, but the idea that it got magnified in the media Just made it all the better Because you know you have two thought systems and they don't really have a meeting point And the more magnified things get the more you can go I see it I see it and then you can start to apply it to your own life Because it's so the lesson is so magnified It starts to make you think in your own life. Wow You can think back to different scenarios that you seem to be involved with and different altercations you've had with people around it could be run legal things or Arguments or fights or divorces or all the different things that people seem to Argue about and then you can see this is like wow, this is really for my mind to get clear about What it's always been about Like it's always been about the same thing You know this this healing finding that kindness finding that love within yourself. So So I think we'll have a great discussion afterwards because it's yeah, every time you watch it it's a it's a rinse the total rinse of the mind and Yeah, New York City, you know New York City's had some pretty extreme things that have been has been part of its Contacts its history of course 9 11. It's probably most famous for The towers coming down But the even after that there were all these stories around the firemen Around the police officers around the ones that were there Trying to do The right thing just trying to be truly helpful in major extreme cases you know I've even I watched the documentary of it was basically following a The police officer on that day when it happened and the cameras were rolling. They were filming a documentary on 9 11 They were following this cop around it was I think trying to Help people and do you know on the streets and then you could hear these He's low flying planes and he's like going well something's weird that that was a low plane and then And then it hits the towers and you've got the whole thing Recorded as it's happening Um doing a documentary on this police officer. Eventually. He's drawn over to to the towers and you can hear these These thuds in the background it's literally people jumping out For the towers and it's filming they're on Ground on the ground in ground zero you can hear these these You hear the bodies as people are leaping to try to leap out of the towers Because the towers are on fire and exploding everything and and um, and then it actually it comes in with the police with the fire department and you go up into one of the towers you're in One of the towers as the other tower collapses. You're in Filming inside just like when they showed this thing on national television people were like yeah get it off of there You can't people's emotions were like So brought up because it was literally You know it'd be like we'll have the camera like following this Hop around and then police officers and going right into the buildings and and the Panic everything's going on and then And then there's this dust flying everywhere, you know at some point the tower the the other tower has collapsed and this is Like foggy dust that just completely fills the tower that the documentary is being filmed You get a chance that would be a good mind watch for this. We probably can find it Put it on the screen It's a really good mind-watching Because it's like you're right there, you know it's not like Re-enacted, you know, it's It's like really right there. So with this one This is again based on the two stories So you can kind of get the feel for how it starts to play out and how the media grabs the whole of it and how You have to be willing if you're following the characters to just at every point pause and let go Just keep an eye on your emotions if you start to be drawn in You start rooting for any characters if you find yourself drawn in to take a side if you find yourself um judging The media or judging anything that's getting magnified and blown up. Just remember it's all for Accepting the atonement in your mind. It's all for healed perception. It has nothing To do with a movie or a story. That's what's so good about Okay


At least the way that I framed it in this presentation was to say that there are different communities within the development enterprise. And the way that aid officials and the way that the elite researchers think about aid effectiveness is somewhat different to the way that frontline practitioners think about effectiveness.  But for, by the time that range of different activity gets aggregated and it gets talked about in Busan and Korea, for example, then the aid intelligentsia is stressing out about getting to all the wording is right on the international agreements or imagining that and while hoping that in some sense the coherence and coordination powers of within development turn on the extent to which people are responding to these kinds of documents. And so I was just trying to say that those are very different communities of practice and they both have a place. There's, you know, we need to have good research on these things. There's an important role for international actors who want to try and articulate, you know, agreements between organizations and nations to make sure that resourcing and activity is done in a coordinated way. But, you know, when a frontline practitioner is showing up for work every day and they don't think they have in the back of their head am I being faithful to what was agreed on in Busan? They're just trying to survive. They're trying to do their job. So once you have, really once you recognize that there's something of a disconnect often and necessary or was disconnected between what people are doing on a day-to-day basis versus what gets talked about at a higher level of aggregation, then you just need to, that implies that there are very different ways of thinking about what this concept called being an effect, aid effectiveness or development effectiveness might actually mean. So, and then sort of between those two things, then you also have them, you know, the actors that are doing development are organizations or countries trying to enact a policy or enact a program. And those particular actors exist in a political economy within their own country. And in a country like Cambodia at the moment, for example, what does it mean for the World Bank to be effective? Well, as it happens, for various different reasons, the whole lending program is in abeyance at the moment. We're not lending any money because of some disagreements with the government about how a particular program of work had been implemented, right? Now, if you have very narrow or at least have the intelligentsia view of development effectiveness, you'd want to sort of have a checklist of things that you're doing. You want to, are you contributing to millennium development goals? Are you effectively coordinating with other actors? It's kind of, if that's your metric of what constitutes being effective, but your whole lending program is suspended, it's kind of hard then to claim that you're being effective when there's no activity to be done. But there can actually be a way of being effective, and that will mean trying to restart negotiations with the country, trying to ensure that an ongoing dialogue is sustained, and that you won't be able to measure that in any sort of formal accounting way that would then be able to be presented as part of a broader platform of work, but that's what being effective means in that particular context. And so part of the broader way in which we've been trying to think about this stuff is to say there is sort of the big picture, an international level agreements way of thinking about development effectiveness, which is reflected in millennium development goals and these kind of things, and you're effective if you are contributing to these international agreements. And then there's the more super micro level activities of day-to-day employees, but there's sort of a missing middle, and we call that sort of a middle way approach to development, which is sort of trying to think about how can organizations build up their own capacities to be useful, and a lot of that capacity to be useful is about responding to the prevailing problems that exist in the country, but those prevailing problems may or may not be the ones that when you try and respond to them add up to things that the rest of the world would ordinarily recognize as being effectiveness. So even within the intelligentsia space, even when we have sort of researchers in the narrow sense of people that worry about trying to net out the impact of a thing called a project, we find ourselves at the moment in a world where there's a particular dominance way of thinking about what counts as a plausible, defensible answer to the question of whether my project in Ghana, for example, actually works. So in the way in which we've set that debate up right now was a fairly narrow set of criteria for what counts as an effective answer to all of that. And part of what I was trying to say with that was that even with a very neat and tight research design in a strict methodological sense, data doesn't exist in a theory-free zone. Data always has to be interpreted in the context of expectations and with respect to a theory of change that makes sense of that data. So I was basically saying if you took two projects, but in this case they happened to be two seeds and unbeknownst to you, one of them was an oak tree and one of them was a sunflower and you put them in the ground and you had a tight timeline for effectiveness in the narrow sense being put on you and you checked back in in a year's time to see how well those seeds were performing. You'd have beautiful, flowering, sunflower, six-feet tall, beaming away at you and you'd have nothing on the other one. And if you were a strict empiricist, you'd be saying, wow, my sunflower's been to attackally successful, aren't I great horticulturalist? I've done very well. I don't know, isn't this other seed terrible on this other? It's a failure, we have nothing to show for it. But that interpretation would only be correct if you were willfully ignorant of a theory of seed production in which you would know that it actually takes only about six weeks for a sunflower to reach maturity and it takes two years for an oak tree to even begin to pop up through the ground, in which case you've made a very fundamental error of attribution regarding the effectiveness. So the point of that is to say, well, at least in horticulture, we have theories of change that correspond to each of the kind of interventions or seeds that we have. We don't have anything remotely like that in development, it seems to me, we assume implicitly that all projects unfold in a nice little neat straight line.  But most of the interventions that I happen to worry about and work on unfold what we call a step function, sort of lots of nothingness and a big change. And if you look at what's going on in the Arab Spring, the moment, for example, if you look at the governance indicators over the last 10 years are only heading downhill in terms of their measured effectiveness, but all of a sudden now we're seeing a flourishing of democracy. Or if they're not step functions, they're J-curves. They get worse before they get better. And if you're not aware of that, you can suddenly start to make proclamations about the impact of projects that if you're unaware that you just happen to be in the trough of the J-curve, not only have you not had an impact, you've actually made things worse. So the point of this was to say, well, at least in this one field called horticultural, we make determinations about impact and effectiveness conditional on a theory of change or a theory of seed production that we work with. Whereas in developments, everything has to be unfolding on a straight line and we deploy a very particular kind of instrument to assess the impact of these things. Usually now randomized controlled trials, but my point was simply that even the squeakiest, cleanest, randomized controlled trial didn't give you an accurate interpretation unless you had a good theory to inform that particular thing. And the sun clouds and no trees just seem a nice sort of juxtaposition, but I think a lot of people are starting to recognize that's a more generic problem, but these days at least is on local level justice reform, trying to make sure that dispute resolution procedures and the gradual transfer of rule systems that previously existed in the minds of village elders and chiefs into something that is a bit more universal, that can be adjudicated through professionals called lawyers or whatever. And that's a very different kind of intervention or different kind of problem. So it's important to look at these things historically because the law, as we now understand it, isn't the outworking of a great legal mind that sort of had a very clear goal and everything, all our activities were conditional on moving towards that great aspiration. It was, how do we make an existing situation a little bit better now? And then once we get to that point, how do we make that little situation get a bit better? So it's working iteratively. That's only clear looking back rather than looking forward, which, what came to be effective? So what might be effective? Well, from the point of view of where we are now looking forward, there's a whole range of plausible options that one could choose. Most of the time in development we don't wanna work like that, we wanna work like this. We wanna say, well, there's my goal. That's what I really wanna, that's what I think is the answer to the problem. So everything we do then is conditional on getting to that. Whereas this kind of problem that we're working on is much more over ended with respect to where one could go. And it's only with virtue of 10 years looking back that you say, well, that's what came to be effective. That's what ended up being the answer. But we ended up here with a different set of actors, different set of circumstances we could have ended up over there. And it's not that this one's better than that one, that's how the system evolved over time. It took us over here rather than over there. So to do that effectively is a different kind of research task. And what we've been trying to do with our work on local justice reform is put local evidence, compiled by local researchers into the decision making space where the next steps regarding transformation are being undertaken. So not trying to set ourselves up as the arbiters to sort of give a thumbs up or down verdict on whether what they're doing is working right now as such though that might be part of it. Certainly not in that sense of will this be publishable in an elite journal because we've satisfied all the methodological hoops that we need to satisfy to get ourselves published there. We're just saying at the moment most of these debates about local justice reform are occurring in a data-free zone. Anecdote versus anecdote, it's sort of one power play versus someone else's power play and we are bold enough to think that it might be a little bit better if some evidence was inserted into that conversation to move that forward. But because of the sensitive nature of these questions and because of when you're messing with or changing the rule system in a society those rules are very complicated not just in a technical sense, they're complicated because they're very context-idiosyncratic they're by their nature very much embedded in a constituent of the local culture even. So to have a bunch of white guy experts fly in and sort of deem what should be happening in those situations, even if it's technically the right way of thinking about that is just gonna bounce out of their decision-making space because they are in the same way that we would if a bunch of foreigners came to our country in my case of Australia and started dictating what should be happening. It was like, you have no clue about my country who are you to come and start changing what's going on? So our approach has been to embed local researchers in my case within the World Bank's country team but working as much as possible with local researchers and investing a lot in building up their capacities to do local research so that we produce good enough evidence to be able to move policy debate constructively forward and constructively in the sense of making a little bit more evidence-based than it might have been otherwise. And then the decisions are what the decisions are. We're not sort of saying, our job isn't then to sort of cast judgment necessarily on whether this was a fantastic idea or it will only become apparent over years, decades even how long or whether that kind of approach was working or not. So we're not in the business of trying to say, well, we know what that answer is. We know what good land law is. We know what good administrative law is because it works fantastically in Finland. So we'll hire a bunch of Finns who know all about how to set up telecommunications law, for example, to go and work out this particular problem. So our starting point is ignorance and our second point of moving from that full point of ignorance is to say, let's pay our dues to this country. So let's respect what's already there and let's try and bring what we can by way of best social scientific research practice to bear on this particular issue as it now stands and pay up and just be patient enough to be able to be then part of this ongoing dialogue. And in a very specific case in a country like Cambodia, for example, where the big issue was trying to nurture a labor law, for example, there was no labor law. And in some sense initially that was very attractive to foreign producers because they figured they could kind of just do what they want. And but over time as their production expanded, they just by necessity recognized that actually, you know, having decent labor capital relations was pretty important to being able to respond to international critics who were claiming that they were just exploiting local labor. It was symbolically and substantively important. So they needed a labor law. Now, you know, we have numerous examples around the world of what an effective labor law looks like, but you can't just cut and paste that from one context into another. You have to try and, the challenge in Cambodia was how do you nurture an indigenous labor law that makes sense to Cambodians that has local legitimacy for not just Cambodians, but for international actors. When the Gap and Benetton and all the big companies are doing business there, they want a serious law that they can engage with. So the initial tasks, the initial response and quite an innovative response in Cambodia was not to import an existing system or even just a prototype and then sort of adapt it. It was let's create a space wherein the government, the international actors and labor organizations can negotiate over time and then something that will become labor law and initially it was non-binding and everybody was saying that's how can you, how can, it's not even a law, it's non-binding. How can you possibly even claim that it's a law? The idea was to say in the common law sort of sense, we'll just, we'll let a set of practices emerge. We'll let a set of transparent processes be put in motion whereby something like the beginnings of an agreement can be nurtured and by the time you put 800 cases as now that there are two through that system, you're actually now moving from non-binding to binding. It has become beginnings of a law instead of then and even if 10 years in now, looking back, we said, well, if you'd hired five smart lawyers from Belgium, we could have probably nailed that in five months, why do we have to take 10 years? So then you've nurtured it. It has whole content and credibility by virtue of being through a domestic political process and come out the other end looking like something that Cambodians now own as their own and it has elements of similarity, of course, with how it appears elsewhere. But ultimately it's a law that Cambodians can be proud of. It's not what you'd actually would have designed from scratch, it's evolved and gone this way rather than that way because of this particular space. So I like those kind of examples. So I think it's an instance of where the international community was useful. It wasn't just a completely laissez-faire left on the almost left to emerge in its own time. It was a space that was created and in that space all sorts of weird and wonderful things happened and I like seeing that, I think you can, that's what's replicatable out of all this. Not the form, not the content of the law, it's the process that's the petri dish within which that was allowed to grow and that's when we talk about what's replicatable and what's transferable in development effectiveness, what's transferable is the principles and the decision-making spaces where in these things evolved and that's when I see that happening, that's why I think, yeah, we've actually been useful in development but we haven't been prescriptive. We haven't sort of claimed all mighty expertise on a particular issue. We've just said, well, let's create a space and let a good contest happen and we'll let whatever happens as a result of that good contest be what it is. One of the things that the group of us that work on this have been concerned about for a long time is that you can see quite sustained advances and progress in various different dimensions of development but the one that seems to lag behind and a lot of the others is the capacity of governments to implement things and even implement relatively basic everyday services like schooling and health and those kinds of things. So when you look at the amount of energy and resourcing in development that is done, an awful lot of it goes up front to designing the perfect looking project down to the finest detail and making sure that everything looks like what we think are well designed projects to look like and then we kind of assume implementation and then other bunch of people show up after the fact to assess it and make big claims about the effectiveness of this thing. So it's a very bimodal kind of allocation of resourcing and a lot up front and a bit more at the tail end but there's kind of this missing middle. So both as an observed reality that you have countries that have been independent for 200 years in the case of 80, taking an awfully long time to achieve even some pretty modest demonstrated capacities to do things on the one side and yet from the donors to develop an active side a vacuum almost with respect to worrying about these implementation issues which are kind of seen as a little bit boring, as a bit prosaic or just not really where the serious intellectual work happens, all the brain powers in the, getting the wording and the content of your design or running some nice randomized control trial at the end and puring the guys in white lab coats at the end sort of being the scientists that make the DecoZoo statement about impact. So we're trying to sort of make the implementation side cooler than it has been for its practice but with it not just in its own sake it's because we ultimately think that part of the broader package of modernity is making the state system capable of doing what state systems are supposed to do and a lot of those are non-negotiable tasks pertaining to education health and public finances and justice and so when countries persistently show sort of a flat line with respect to their capacity and capabilities of to implement these things we call that capability trap and our research is dangerous about trying to unpack that a little bit more, explain it at one level but ultimately trying to figure out how to be more, how to be useful with respond to, when we're invited to a particular country to respond to a particular problem how exactly do you help in the case of Lance work on India or how do you help the Indian government to do a better job on getting kids to learn stuff in school. Can't give a truly objective answer to that because of the gaps that I see and the gaps that I happen to think of the salient ones and so I'm trying always and trying to encourage students to put their brains behind these kinds of issues because for me they're the ones that I personally find interesting but from an applied point of view I also think they're interesting by the way of moving the agenda forward so I guess to be consistent with what I've just told you I think this question around how we enhance the capabilities of governments in the first instance but organizations more generally how you figure out how to put, not just in a design sense how you sort of structure that that's how we instinctively want to think about things and I think it's a problem to design is the organizational chart needs to be reconfigured or we need to pay people more money those are relatively pro-zac sort of standard ways in which we do it trying to think about how you put different kinds of pressure I guess or how you try and ensure that what the organizations do rather than what they look like is what we measure is what we ultimately finance and reward those are important issues as I indicated before I think another really big question is how we address these problems in development for which there isn't a known answer up front so the Cambodian label law is an example of that but there's a whole bunch of stuff thinking about this stuff these are legion, they're everywhere whole bunch of problems for which we don't know and shouldn't pretend to know that we have the answer up front but pretty much everything in the way the development business is structured heavily rewards the expert who has the answer who can run around countries and give big lectures and say nice things about only you invested more in micro-credit or only you invested more in your urban property rights systems than you too could be on the path to great riches and that's only ever one part of it but that's the more sort of serious analytical question really is we just don't we can't know what that answer is to a lot of these kind of questions and presuming that even with the 10 smartest people in the world that we would figure out that answer that in itself becomes part of the problem and we want problems to be solved that way and we reward people for doing that and we think that because you've got a PhD that you've invested all this energy in getting it that to be an expert in that true sense of the word you're paid to provide answers not to try to complicate people's world but I think a lot of these questions we're dealing with complicating it this is exactly what we're trying to do because in the sense not complicating the sense of just trying to obfuscate and make it more confusing trying to clarify what is inherently a confusing task and trying to short for fast track that learning process for any group of people is really I think an important issue the other big gap to the methodologically I think is that we are as researchers we kind of have a good set of tools for dealing with small numbers of cases ethnographic case study kind of work one to 20 we have all sorts of nice econometric tools for dealing with 200 to 20 million but there's another example of a bimodal distribution of our brain space as I said before with project implementation a lot up front, a lot at the end not much in the middle same sort of thing with research it seems to me that we have goods we know how to deal with small lens we know how to deal with big ends but the problems in the world often come in sort of bunches of 40 or 50 or 60 as researchers we're very clumsy it seems to me for no obvious reason really well maybe it's obvious but as a research community we seem very lame when it comes to addressing problems for which there are instances of 40 say it's too big for ethnographic case study works too small for anything high powered statistically why can't we say something more sensible when the end of our problem is 40 and as it happens a lot of things in development something's probably been tried in about 40 different countries or so so how do we as researchers make much more fruitful with these middle range kinds of problems so whether it's implementation whether it's kind of the kinds of problems we address or the kinds of tools that we bring to bear on them I think there's always we've only gone so small but if I feel that sometimes we're just like medieval doctors we're still putting leeches on these things we don't have a good theory we don't have a we're so we so load up on one particular set of skills that we think is what we need to do that when these problems require all sorts of different skills and they just need to be put into a mix and they need to come out the other side but ultimately you know this is how we're in social science and I emphasize often the social as much as the science but hopefully as more generations of people work on this stuff we'll get a little bit better but for me the end game has never been about trying to you know reach a technical Nirvana where we actually know what to do about this so I think that's a scary world we don't want to be in a world that's why we novelists write books like Frankenstein and stuff you know once people actually think that they've nailed all of this stuff around humans then super scary stuff starts to happen so I'm I'm much more comfortable and a lot of my economist colleagues are with with a bit of deep uncertainty I think that's that's how it should be so you know there's no shortage of ways in which we can improve the rigor of the quality of our work there's no shortage of interesting problems we should be addressing on but if we get a little bit beyond the leeches as our theory of how to cure illness then that's gonna be progress but I don't want us to be in a world of you know the perfect squeaky clean machine that we've actually nailed this stuff because that's a way scary world and I don't want to live in it


Hey everyone, it's Professor Howard. I wanna talk a little bit about personality, but specifically personality from the perspective of a behavior analyst or a behaviorist. It's not uncommon for intro psych textbooks to get behavior analysis completely wrong. And I think that this has a lot to do with the history between psychology, psychologists, behaviorists and some of the political interpersonal history between different fields or different philosophical approaches to understanding people. Now, many intro psych textbooks will say things like, behaviorists don't believe in personality or they'll say things like, to a behaviorist, personality is just a series of habits. Now these statements are neither entirely true nor are they entirely false. So let's go back for a moment to discuss what we mean by personality. There's lots of different definitions, but the one that we use in my course, general psychology is that personality are these long standing traits and patterns that cause an individual to consistently think, feel and behave in certain ways. Right now, you can say that what that's doing is saying that there's something about the individual that causes them to do things a certain way. You can tell immediately that a behaviorist is probably not likely to buy into ideas of thoughts and feelings because those tend to be private events and a behaviorist tends to focus on publicly observable phenomena or relations between the environment and behavior. So does that extend? Yes, you could argue that a behaviorist would immediately say, well, thoughts and feelings aren't really a thing, but thoughts and feelings are private events. No behaviorist would argue that you don't occasionally think to yourself or that you don't have feelings about things. Those are simply private events and we don't use them to explain public events. The other place where you would see that a behaviorist would have some trouble with this definition is this idea of a trait, a personal trait. And when you start discussing ideas of traits, we're talking about internal causal variables. There's something about your personality inside you that then manifests as a pattern of behavior and a behaviorist simply wouldn't ascribe to that notion. Now, does that mean that there's stuff inside you or stuff that you're biologically preprogrammed to do that a behaviorist wouldn't believe in? Of course not. Behaviorists believe that there's a combination of your biological endowment and your environment and those two factors work together to make who you are. So let me give you an example. We know that children who experience significant abuse or bullying in their teenage years will actually see changes in their neuro-structural. So you might find that a person who's experienced significant trauma at a critical period when their brain is developing could be more sensitive to punishment.  They're gonna be very sensitive to it. Now, that's a biological difference but it developed out of experience. It developed out of that interaction between your biology and the environment. What does that mean for personalities? Now, a behaviorist is going to absolutely agree that people do things for reasons but a behaviorist is likely to say that that interaction between your predispositions, your biological endowment, your prior learning history and your current situation is the best description or the best predictor of what you're gonna do in the future. Let me give you another example. Imagine that you see me get a cup of coffee Monday morning. You see me get a cup of coffee Tuesday morning. You see me get a cup of coffee Wednesday morning. You'll probably predict that on Thursday morning I'll get a cup of coffee and the chances are very good that I will get a cup of coffee. Now, if I'm attempting to explain this with a trait, then I'm going to say that I might have a caffeine seeking personality but a behaviorist is gonna look at this pattern of behavior over time and say, well, based on prior experience we should predict that in the future this person will do this and that's what behaviorists think about personality that when we're trying to describe people what we're really describing are temporally extended patterns of behavior over time. When we see you do it again and again and again and again it increases the likelihood that you'll do that particular behavior or behaviors that serve the same function again in the future. What do I mean by function? So why do I drink coffee? It could be that I like the taste of coffee or it could be that there's something very specific about coffee, especially coffee in the morning that does something for me that meets a need for me. So imagine coffee Monday, coffee Tuesday, coffee Wednesday but Thursday, my favorite coffee shop is closed. Instead, I stop at a gas station I buy a Red Bull, right? Functionally, that Red Bull is going to contain caffeine which could serve the same purpose or meet the same need as my coffee did. So it doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna see the same precise behavior again and again and again and again and again over time but rather you could have a cluster of behaviors that all mean the same thing. When you're nervous, if you bite your nails but you're in a setting where you can't do that maybe instead you thoughtfully chew on a pen because that looks better or it's perceived differently than nail biting, right? They're functionally similar behaviors. So it's not that behaviors think that personality doesn't exist or that people don't have personality. Rather, we look at personality as being this description of temporally extended patterns of behavior over time. I'm curious what you think. Let me know and I look forward to your questions.


If I wouldn't mind seeing a fastball elevated to change the eye level of Gary Sanchez, then maybe you go back off speed. Right down the pipe. Wow. Wow. Good morning, good afternoon, and good night. Cainley threw his fastball 44% of the time last year. He threw the change up 52% of the time.