This video will show you how to use the Washington Career Bridge website. Open the Internet and go to www.careerbridge.wa.gov. Press Enter. Click on View Job Trends. You can click on the left of the screen or in the middle. Type the name of the job you want to research. For example, Nursing Assistant. Click Search. Nursing Assistant is first on the list. You can see the typical annual earnings and employment outlook. Click on Nursing Assistance. On this page, you can see the growth rate and openings per year. You can also see the wages. Now, click on Find Education. Here, you type the job and type your zip code or click on your county. For example, Nursing Assistant. I am in Olympia, so I can type the zip code 98501 or click on Thirsten. Click Search. You will see a list of places you can get a Nursing Assistant certificate. You can look at this website now. You will practice using it more in class.


So here I go with the Art Risen Happy Contest, show us what makes you happy and you could win a two gallon Art Risen Pro kit. Now here's what makes us happy. Oh that was my cue, missed it by two or three seconds, but I'm present, I'm going to tell you what makes me happy. I got this blonde angel, she's Rebecca Daff, the world is yours, it's one of the things that I'm loving up. Pretty, she's smart, gives more than she takes, you can rule the world if you just knew what women do. And I got Zoe Kat, she's the queen, never seen such a girl as pretty as her, but she's smart too, Xavier in the mix. My number two son, he's my man with the stick to the plan, I love a woman, like she's your sister, your mom, this freedom that I'm chasing, letting me be in my own basement on a Tuesday afternoon, rapping to you, just make mistakes, this rap is over, it's made a mistake.


The West End of Louisville is near and dear to me. That's where I'm from. I just see infinite opportunity here. My name is Dennette Matthews. I have two children. I also have custody of my sister's five children. So that's a total of seven. Having seven kids, it's a challenge. It's a lot of things that I lot of different times. When I was laid off from my job, it was absolutely terrifying. I knew something had to change. So when I heard about the Applied Digital Skills courses at Ampt, that definitely appealed to me. Today we're going to work on creating a professional resume. Ampt is a nonprofit organization. They offer free adult learning classes while your children are learning music. Google Applied Jesus Skills works great for us at Ampt. This is a free video curriculum that can teach anyone basic digital skills. It's one thing to ask a person to pull themselves up out of their bootstraps, but it's cruel when that person has no boots. Digital skills gives you boots. You're learning how to create spreadsheets, documents, forms, and surveys. I'm thinking, I can put this on my resume. I can become more marketable. I love the budgeting module. Having seven kids, it is imperative to have a budget. The Applied Digital Skills course is accessible absolutely anywhere. So it was really easy to balance mommy duties with my educational priorities. So up, squat down. Oh, Lord, he's such a show-off. I think the Applied Digital Skills course can be a catalyst for anyone in West Louisville. It's a blessing. When you lift up one person, you lift up the entire community. I am looking forward to the future. I feel like I'm now ready to be able to compete. I envision really great things happening for me, for my family. It's empowering to have that knowledge that nobody can take away from you.


Hello, I'm David Decavalho, the new Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority and I started in the job in March 2019. Welcome to my new video log which I've entitled Fanning the Flames of Wonder in honour of a great maths teacher I had when I was at school. His name was Kevin Garrity and whenever Kevin was setting us a particularly tricky problem he would often wander around the classroom carrying a hand-held fan and waving it over us. And one day I asked him, Sir what are you doing? And he said, I'm fanning the flames of wonder. Fanning the Flames of Wonder is a wonderful description of the role of teachers and the education system more broadly and what I hope to do with this video log is likewise fan the flames of wonder about what good education means particularly in terms of our responsibilities at Akara in Assessment Curriculum Reporting. So in this first edition of my video log I'd like to start on a personal note. Here is a photograph of my granddaughter Emma taken when she was about two months old.  Love, trust and wonder. When we are born we arrive into a situation over which we have no control. We didn't choose our parents, our community, the time and place of our arrival. We just turn up but even before we are born our brains are beginning to construct the means by which we will attempt to make sense of our experience. Making sense of experience, constructing order and meaning and out of a whole chaotic stream of events. Without that we cannot make sense of the world around us and we don't know what to do how to act. The gift that enables us to start making sense of the world around us is the gift of curiosity, the gift of wonder where each of us ask what is going on here, why are the things the way they are. Now Emma is looking into the face of her mother with a look of wonder and trust. In the space of two months she's already learnt that it is her parents to whom she will look to help make sense of the world but in a few years time she'll be at school and it will be her teachers that she will trust to help her through the next phase of her journey of discovery and self-discovering and the same goes for every student who attends Australian schools. So everyone involved in our school education system in this country is involved in an enterprise that should have as its primary focus fanning the flames of wonder in our children and young people and here at Akara we have a particular set of responsibilities in curriculum, assessment and reporting and I'm going to use this video log as a way of talking about particular aspects of those responsibilities. In this first edition I'd like to focus on the first word in our title. We are the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority. Our coverage is national. We are owned by all education ministers not just the Commonwealth Minister but the state and territory ministers as well. All jurisdictions are represented on our board as are the Catholic sector and the independent sector. So the work we do is relevant to every student in the country and our mission is to work with a wide range of partners to improve the educational outcomes for all students. I'm particularly interested in the educational outcomes of our most disadvantaged communities. Poverty is not just a matter of inadequate financial resources but of not having access to the means of developing the capabilities we need to fulfill our true potential as human beings. Education is the means to do that. At Akara we're committed to ensuring the Australian education system fans the flames of wonder in all children and young people so they can become the best they can be. We're committed to working closely with all stakeholders in this endeavour. Thanks for watching and I look forward to working with you as we fan the flames of wonder.


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Mae'r last talk this session, I promise you an eclectic mix today, and our last talk is something of a left field presentation. I hope Emma doesn't mind me saying that, but I recently noticed the report, I noticed it through the government, the report on what government can, through the guardian sorry, the report on what government can learn from the Olympics and Paralympics. Emma, I think, was lead author of that report, I'm correct in saying that, aren't I? Emma joined the Institute for Government in July 2012 as senior researcher in the policy making team. Emma's presentation will examine the success of the London Olympic and Paralympic Games. I'm really struggling to get my words out here, I apologise, and we'll explore how lessons from the Games can be applied elsewhere, making the Games what we can learn from London 2012. So, as it has been said, I work for an organisation called the Institute for Government, and I'm going to be talking about a piece of work that we did earlier this year, looking at what can be learnt from the London 2012 Olympics. Now, I'm going to be completely upfront and say that my presentation is not about IT, it's about delivering major projects and what major projects can learn from the delivery of the Olympics. But I hope that you'll all be able to draw the parallels between delivering major projects and IT. And I am going to focus on some of the themes of this conference, so new ways of working, new modes of engagement and new skills sets. But before we get on to the detail of what major projects can learn from the Games, I want to start with a quote from somebody I think you'll all know, Boris Johnson. It was a surprise, wasn't it? There we were, little old us, the country that made such a horlicks of the Millennium Dome, celebrations in 2000, putting on a flawless performance of the most logistically difficult thing you can ask a country to do in peacetime. I want you to remember that feeling of surprise, because that surprise is revealing of our chronic tendency in this country to underestimate what we can do. We now need to learn the lessons of the Olympics and the Paralympics. Now I think it's fair to say that that quote from Boris captures a certain sense of surprise that the Olympics were a success. And I think it's also fair to say that in the UK we're prone to anticipating under-delivery in the public sector and particularly anticipating under-delivery when it comes to major projects. Now the Olympics were no different to that. And although many commentators have said since summer 2012 that the Olympics was a one-off, that it was always going to succeed, at the outset, when we went for the Olympics in the first place, success was far from a foregone conclusion and I just want to briefly revisit why and make the case to you. So we had a long history of unsuccessfully bidding for the games. We'd unsuccessfully bid for Birmingham once and for Manchester twice in the 90s. We also, as Boris mentioned, had quite a mixed track record when it came to delivering major projects. We weren't really perceived as a safe bet when you take into account things like the Millennium Dome, Wembley Stadium and Scottish Parliament, all of which had either met mixed expectations, had come in late or well over budget. The games also were a huge scale. The scale of the games was themselves a huge risk and I've just got a few numbers there to try and really drive home the scale of the games. 4,000 extra games times train services were needed to deliver the Olympics. 15,000 police officers had to be deployed. They were huge. It was an enormous risk. And even once we won, there were still real challenges that could have derailed the project before the summer of 2012. So we, as I'm sure you remember, the day after we won the games, bombs went off in London, which completely transformed the security efforts around the games. There was a change of merility in London, a financial crash and a change of national government, and I'm sure we all know the kind of challenges and risks that financial difficulties and political change represent for major projects. Now, although there's going to be an ongoing debate about the success of the legacy of the games in years to come, I think it's fair to say that in the eyes of the public and the press, the six weeks of games time itself, it was seen as very successful. And it was because of that really strong delivery of such a complex, risky project that the Institute for Government wanted to understand how did this happen? How was the game so successful? And when we started to look at that in a bit more detail and talk to some of the people that were involved in making that happen, so we talked to Tessa Jowell, Hugh Robertson, both Olympic ministers, Sebastian Coe, John Armit, some of the key people who'd been involved in delivering it, we were surprised to find out that the success factors for the games weren't niche, they weren't only relevant to other sporting projects, but they could help lots of parts of the public sector and major projects improve delivery. So how did they do it? I think there were two ways that they did it. First was that they found new ways of working on major projects and secondly found new ways of engaging people in the project. I'm going to start by talking about what new ways of working there were in the games. The first new way of working was around politics. I'm sure as many people in the room will be aware politics is a really important factor in public sector work. It was really important for the games in lots of ways. They needed political leadership to happen in the first place. We'd have never won the bid had it not been for people like Tessa Jowell, Hugh Robertson, Tony Blair and Ken Livingstone. But politics also represents a real risk for public sector projects particularly when there's political change, a change of mayorality or a change of national government. The pet project of one government can become the political football of another. So why didn't that happen on the games? Will politicians work together in a very different way? There was a real openness incorporation between different political parties on the games. The Labour government that bid for the games was really open with the Conservative opposition. They allowed civil servants to provide open briefings about the financial health of the games, about security efforts, about all the detail of how delivery was going to happen. Now that openness between a government in power and the opposition was really unusual and it meant that when the Conservatives came to power they were already on the ball. They knew everything that was happening with the major project and they were able to hit the ground running. So the games transformed one major risk around politics into something that actually enhanced the performance of the project. The second new way of working was around people and skills and skills and capabilities on public projects. Getting them right can often be quite a challenge on major projects and again this was done a bit differently on the games. So government and the games delivery bodies tried to recruit world class experts in finance, IT, construction, project management pretty much every area you can think of and they paid the salaries that went with that. Alongside that they made sure they recruited the best public and civil servants to the government team. So the government team was a mix of really kind of top-notch commercial skills and sectoral knowledge but it combined that with really strong expertise around how you make politics whitehall and the public sector machine work. It was an example of a really strong private public partnership if you like. And the second slightly different way of working around people and skills was instability. People who went and worked on the games in 2005 saw that project through in 2012 in government, in the public sector and in the private sector. They stayed with the project for its whole lifetime. Now as many people who have worked in the civil service will know that's relatively unusual. Staying on a project for that length of time is often not encouraged and often is not even possible. So that's a completely new way of working. Third, a slightly obvious point perhaps, is around the way that the governance and institutional design of the games work. So I mean when we were doing interviews we talked to a guy called Jeremy Beaton who ran the Government Olympic Executive and what he kept saying to us was it's incredible. People keep asking me who's in charge of London 2012 in government and I have to tell them no one, no one's in charge because responsibility sat across all number of departments, sat across a few different ministers. It was a very complicated governance environment and the delivery bodies for the games for instance the Olympic delivery authority which built the stadium had to be created from scratch. They didn't exist already when we won the bid. So what was done differently in this incredibly risky environment, well for a start there were really clear roles and responsibilities and responsibilities were chunked up to different organisations. Everybody knew what they were doing and secondarily lots of responsibility was placed at arms length from government so learning from some of the challenges around the millennium dome actually delivering the content for the games and delivering the stadium was placed at arms length. Experts were allowed creative control if you like over key parts of the games and just thoroughly looking at delivery and how delivery was done differently. Well the games had some advantages of course the Olympics was the hardest of hard deadlines and that can't be said for all major projects failing to deliver on time was not an option. But some other things were done slightly differently so firstly a scope was set out for the games in 2005 by the Olympic delivery authority and the government Olympic executive and they didn't deviate from that scope. It wasn't changed a year in, it wasn't changed three years in, it's staying the same and the governance structure and the delivery architecture was built in a way that discouraged change for the scope so the scope stayed the same. The government also invested really heavily in expert project management it spent in fact £725 million on a delivery partner CLM who managed the delivery of the project and that created real results and perhaps most interestingly around delivery. Government wasn't afraid of giving away power it delegated authority to where expertise sat so it delegated authority to the Olympic delivery authority to the Department for Transport delegated it to TFL. They were interested in where the expertise was and that's where the authority sat but of course not everything went well when it came to delivering the games and I think it's really important to acknowledge that one of the failures in the games occurred when the organisation wasn't capable of finding new ways of working. Wasn't capable of changing its practices to meet the challenge of the games and I'm sure everybody in the room remembers the G4S failure around security, the failure to provide an adequate number of security personnel for the games. And our analysis when we talk to people who are involved in this is that G4S tried to treat the games as business as usual, it didn't step up its game, it didn't adapt to a new way of working and as a result it failed to deliver. So I said I was also going to talk about new modes of engagement and how that helps this project be delivered. And there are really two things that I wanted to touch on that were done differently when it comes to modes of engagement. The first is around the budget, it's really about transparency. Often in public sector projects government can be quite nervous about putting any figures in public because it might be held to account. It can be nervous about committing itself. That was done very differently on the games. The government adopted a total disclosure approach where it published its accounts every quarter. It proactively engaged with the press and the public on those figures. That helped build a public sense of confidence that the games was going to be delivered to budget. But it also created efficiency. It put a downward pressure on costs by putting those figures in public and adopting a transparent approach. And the second quite different thing was that a really focused engaging vision was created for the games by LOCOG by the London Olympic delivery authority. So there were a whole range of interests in the games. Lots of people wanted them to come to London for different reasons. Ken Livingstone wanted them to come to London because they were going to help regenerate the East End. Others wanted them to come to the UK because they were going to boost regional employment. There wasn't any one reason why people wanted the games to come to London. And all those different agendas could have resulted in conflicts, people working to very narrow, siloed interests. So to combat that, the bid company and then latterly LOCOG in collaboration with government developed one very clear objective that all these other interests had to orbit around. And that clear objective was creating a great games for everyone as they called it. And what they meant by that was that everyone had to focus on creating a successful six weeks in the summer and everything else came after that. They encouraged people to work to that objective, to that vision first and to the silo second. Now finally I said I was going to touch on new skill sets and almost all the lessons I've outlined so far have been quite positive but as I said when talking about G4S not everything has gone well. Now in the games lots of public sector staff developed really new and useful skills around programme delivery, project management, types of issues that are becoming more and more, types of skills that are becoming more and more valued in central government. And they learnt them partly because of the partnership between the private sector and the public sector. Now one of our big questions is what's happening to those skills, to all the new skills that have been created as a result of that partnership. And lots of the civil servants that we spoke to said that once the games came to an end and they were being redeployed, they were being deployed into roles where those new skills were not going to be used, they didn't know how they were going to keep those fresh. And I think that's a really important piece of learning, they felt they had developed new skills that were valuable, these are certainly skills that government thinks are valuable too. So major projects need to make sure that as those skills are being developed they're being redeployed, they're continuing to be used, that they're making the most of them. So I've just got a few of our overarching lessons up here, I'm not going to go through each of them but hopefully they'll resonate based on some of the things I've said about making sure that you're really disciplined around change in time, that you create the environment for cooperation, whether that's between politicians or other major players on projects, that you create a sense of stability amongst personnel, that they stay with the project from start to finish, that you bring people together and really effective and mixed teams. You can see we did develop quite a few lessons, I'm not going to go through each of them. But just to conclude, as I said people are going to say that the games was very different, that it was a major project that was unlike anything that's done before, that it was always going to perform, that it was always going to succeed. And I'm not going to deny that there is a certain amount of Olympic exceptionalism, the hardness of the deadline, the pulling power of the games themselves all provided advantages for this major project that not all projects will have. But I think that our analysis shows that everybody working in the public sector or indeed on other types of major project can take something from the games that is relevant to making their major project deliver more successfully. The game shows the value of being bold, it shows the importance of finding new ways of working in order to deliver. Perhaps most importantly of all, one of my own reflections is that improving delivery on major projects is as much about learning from examples of success as it is about learning from failure. Thank you.


Hello and welcome to the session I am Deepika here. Let's discuss a question which of the following functions are strictly decreasing on an open interval 0 to pi by 2 a cos x b cos 2x c cos 3x and d tan x. So let's start the solution. Now we know that a function is strictly decreasing on an open interval where its derivative is negative. So for the given question we will check the derivative of which of the following function is negative on an open interval 0 to pi by 2. So let y is equal to cos x therefore dy by dx is equal to minus sin x. Now for 0 less than x less than pi by 2 sin x is greater than 0. This implies minus sin x is less than 0. This implies dy by dx is less than 0. y strictly decreases on an open interval 0 to pi by 2. Let's move to the part b. Now given function is cos 2x. So let y is equal to cos 2x therefore dy by dx is equal to minus 2 sin 2x. Now for 0 less than x less than pi by 2 that is for 0 less than 2x less than pi positive in first and second quadrant therefore dy by dx which is equal to minus 2 sin 2x is negative that is less than 0. y strictly decreases on an open interval 0 to pi by 2. Let's move to the part c. In part c function is cos 3x let y is equal to cos 3x therefore dy by dx is equal to minus 3 sin 3x. Now for 0 less than x less than pi by 2 that is for 0 less than 3x less than 3 pi by 2. Now for 0 less than 3x less than pi sin 3x is positive therefore dy by dx which is equal to minus 3 sin 3x is negative that is less than 0 therefore y strictly decreases on an open interval 0 to pi less than 3x less than 3 pi by 2 sin 3x is negative therefore dy by dx which is equal to minus 3 sin 3x is positive since y strictly increases on an open interval pi to 3 pi by 2 y strictly decreases on an open interval 0 to pi but strictly increases on an open interval pi to 3 pi by 2 therefore y is not a strictly decreasing function on an open interval 0 to pi by 2. Let's move to the part d. Here the given function is tan x let y is equal to tan x therefore dy by dx is equal to sin square x. Now for 0 less than x less than pi by 2 sin square x is positive being a perfect square therefore dy by dx is positive increases on an open interval 0 to pi by 2. Hence the answer for the upper question is that the functions given in part a and part b strictly decreases on an open interval 0 to pi by 2. I hope the solution is clear to you. Bye and check you.


Next up are two guests who traveled here from very far away, from Canada. And the two speakers are Dominique de Landre from the University of Montreal and her colleague Maxime Goyer from the University of Quebec in Musquie. And they will be talking about transcribous as a techno-social tool. And the social aspect, as I think has become abundantly clear by now, is very important to us as a cooperative. So the floor is yours. So both of us are leading large research projects in partnership that derive directly from transcribous and definitely is opening the doors of the ivory towers to the citizens. Today we will show how transcribous has become a true social, a techno-social tool. First, that will be my part, I will show you how transcribous and my two, the two partnerships that I have called donner le goût de l'archif, but I'm not here. No, doesn't work. Okay, donner le goût de l'archif, give a taste of the archives and the other partnership that derived from this one is called the making of Montreal history. And these two partnerships has created the exchange and spaces of sociability between the academic museum and the citizen world. Then Maxime will present the achievement of Nouvelle-France Numérique, which is here, and show how with the help of volunteer citizens, he has achieved a highly efficient HDR model and developed Modus operandi to link the academics and the citizens. What I do here. I'm trying to reconstruct the past in this digital age with my two big project and it's gathering a lot of students. It's why I ask you the question that are working for their own research, but work with us, we pay them. There is a kind of scholarship. So, transcribous is everywhere in my research, my teaching, the crowdsourcing, and also what we call cultural mediation, aim at the general public that is the whole world of the museums. Personal research is Europe and America in the 16th and 18th century, the French space, especially, so French, France and its colony, women and gender history, intersectionality history, imperial studies and history of slaves, slaves, many slaves. So I came to transcribous because it was a problem of reading. I was looking for women in front of the justice and as you can see this was one of the first page of the first register in the judicial archives that after all my years in the archives, I couldn't read.  So I couldn't read it at the beginning but that's it. So I was very glad. So what we try to do is we are transcribing, we are creating models, but then we use the data that we found in our archives to do social history and to bring the student in history towards every steps of the way towards the citizen. So, and you'll see how we'll do it. Our association with transcribous creates spaces of exchange and sociability between the academic and citizen world, but also it goes on to my dismay, bigger and bigger. It grows and diversified in a kind of sprawling manners. And it's going on still. And I show you what is going on. So, as I told you, I'm going through from the traces that we find all the details and everything in the archives to cultural mediation. So in my two big project that were founded by our national founding society, I don't know if it's a shark anyway. I'm doing my personal research, but I teach also I have two, three courses actually one courses at the B level here. Based on transcribous and AI. Also, at the third level of the BA, I'm doing interest, I supervise internship in my partner, like the museum, the archives, local archives also. So it's a good formation. So right now I have the people working in here in the notary archives in religious archives in the General Hospital of Montreal, educational archives in La Congréation Notre-Dame, doing translating French indigenous dictionaries of the 18th and 19th century. And this is a associations with indigenous band councils. So it's very enriching. And also internship in archeology because the traces that we find in our archives leads to archeological finds that are shown after in the museum. So this is a teaching and the transcribous is of course in the core of it. And then this is the work that I'm doing with my student, a very big student group. And we are transcribing the archives pertaining to Montreal. This is judiciary archives, the parish archives, the notary archives, the state archives, maps and plan and indigenous dictionaries. And we have many basis, unique basis, I have to say databases in Quebec. One is called le programme de démographie historique, historique de démographie database, which allow us to retrace all the settlers from the very beginning of the colony in the 17th century to almost today. So you can, it's a genealogical way of doing things. So I'm just trying to find here. So you type the name. Yesterday, he was talking about somebody very weird name. So I went to this base. And here he is, his wife, second marriage. And if I click on the first marriage, I will have all his children. And these children are, do you say something? For a second interrupt to put this small window away because it's across the time. So this is a unique base, which is very great. The other base is called a demand. So this is why I was so interested by the project of Gunther, because we, we take all these people that we found in the archives. And we go and we can see where they lived. And we can, with the mapping and georeferencing, georeferencing, it's a bit complicated for me to pronounce. We can trace where, for example, in my case, what I'm doing right now about slaves, where did the slaves, indigenous and black slaves, lived in Montreal. So I'm retracing them. It's huge.  So, yeah, this is it. Sorry. Okay, so when we decided to work together with Maxime and others, I decided to create what I call the permanent workshop of documentary analysis and crowdsourcing here. We call it La Patelier. At first it was theory in the morning and practice transcribous in the afternoon. But then we realized that we really need formation. So we transform ourselves in ambassadors of transcribous, among any kinds of people touching the archives. So I've been given a seminar to a formation and introductory seminar to, for example, the National Indigenous Council. We have been in the, among the National Archives, of course, but even a novelist came to me to be able to work with transcribous. So we discovered that we had to diversify the workshop. So we do ad hoc. So people ask us, we go and zoom or whatever. And then we decided to do a summer school that will, we are three university link, a summer school that will alternate between our university is here. So last year and June, last June, it was in Rimouski. And the next year it will be in Montreal. So I invite you all to come because we will talk about the people of Montreal, and we have a specific, there's really a specific scope on management data, data management on the one hand and crowdsourcing also how we work. And you see the public of this summer school, we tie the summer school to a conference, AI, and we can reach academics, qualified staff of the museum and et cetera, and general public. And then that was the formation up to bottom. And then we realized that, whoa, there was a lot coming back from the bottom. So we, I create, well, oops, we create the iPad, the citizen science bottom up. So we have three level now transcription, because that was asked. So it's based on volunteer and students that wants just to be there and transcribe and we improve actually the work of transcribes doing this. But also, in my course, the second level at the BA, and the university, the results of the student was, it was a very brand new course, and the result was so good that I decided to bring seven of them to a big, the big conference in history in Quebec. But then they are in the second year, second year VA level, you know, so I decided to create an iPad history right now that is going on. And we meet with this little group of people interested by transcription, paleographers, genealogists and everything. And these people from the public, they listen to these new students, you know, they are new in the career, and they are presenting their paper. So it's like around, how do you say, a gala de se for them, they try their finding on the people, and we'll go in the end of October in front of the real big history society. So it's the kind of scientific committee based on crowdsourcing and historian, and also the museologists that are there, because they are in the second year of MA, and they will take the finding of the historian and transform it into a virtual exhibition, an exhibition, a podcast, archeomatics and everything. And for that, they will be formed during the winter, iPad museology, and they will be here. They will be formed in this iPad museology next winter. So we will give all this the product to the museum that will show them in 2024. So here is, as you see, the many, the many, many link that we have done with from transcripts from the very first paper that I show you the transcript, to right now it's sprawling literally in the world. As you see, Transcubus is at the center of all these endeavors, and proved to be a true techno social tool, which bridge not only the academics and the non-academics, but also old and new generation of any kind interested in the making of history. And now I said the parole to my colleague. Thank you. Yeah, as Dominique said, we both made a major project in history in Quebec. Sorry. On my side, I'm the director of Nouvelle France Numérique, or Digital New France, if you prefer, which is a research project that was launched in 2019 with, with funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It unites dozens of researchers, including Dominique and all her partners, interested in new friends around the world and follows the objective of studying processes and networks of information flow by analyzing intertextuality in a manuscript document. To achieve this goal, the project aims to centralizes all new friends document transcriptions produced by several researchers in order to make these searchable and interoperable with textometric tools. Right from the start, Transcubus was the tool that made this project realistic and possible, and was our main centralizing platform, allowing us to work collaboratively. As we needed to get access to digital images of archives. We also encourage establishment establishing partnership between researchers and archive centers so the archive centers became totally part of the project. And in the third place, all this was designed to help us find philological links between documents, which was impossible up to now with archival materials. After three years, the project has achieved transcribing over has transcribed, sorry, over 100,000 pages, and it is now developing into a new partnership called Transcreer la Nouvelle-France for transcribing new friends. Building on the research on the results, sorry, of Nouvelle-France numérique, Transcreer la Nouvelle-France aims to develop a public repository allowing to associate transcriptions to database through linked open data for archive or description and named entities and make all these transcriptions available to the public and researchers. It also seeks to enable development of a high tools to enrich transcription and analyze documents. And finally, it aims to unite documentary heritage dissemination with research that I'm an agent. So here is the link with our summer school in that I'm an agent research management. Indeed with our public repository we want to establish a new kind of partnership between archive centers, researchers and the public in order not only to make research data. Available to public open and available to public sorry, but also to keep these data open to continuous enrichment by researchers because research that has are produced. They are planned to be stocked on research repository, but freeze. So we want to keep these data. Alive so that people can work on them constantly and enrich correct transcription and rich with metadata. This is quite a task as it opposed in some way it is opposed to in some way to traditional archive centers approach the dissemination of their collections up to now archive centers have been quite free to open their, their websites to collect data that can change the they always want finished data to be available to public. And if we start producing huge amount of data, these data won't be finished and they will never be closed and perfect so we have to find another way to work together. I thought it was not planned at the beginning of the project participatory science has become a fundamental element of digital new friends with the integration of the garden team about a year ago. The other nut is an old French word that design a French office created in the middle age to keep the minute of contracts transcription obligation, etc, and which was likely merged into the office of notary. The integration of this component was a real bottom up process, as it were the volunteers who express their interest in contributing their expert, their expertise to the current scientific research in order to further develop their skills and the garden that are self supporting organization self organizing group structure to answer that the polygraphers can work without depending on the constant supervision of researchers. So we discussed that they were, they needed to be able to work by themselves because if we were always involved in correcting and reviewing the work they were doing. We would consume more time in supervising their work than doing our research. So, participants are organized into work teams based on their respective experience and skills so that newcomers can be introduced to the workings of the group, the work protocols and the challenges associated with the type of documents that the current research is addressing. This system has major benefits for volunteers it provides pedographers with place to practice their favorite hobby, while making a tangible contribution to the advancement of research. It also provides an opportunity to network with other pedographers outside the usual circle of their local genealogical and historical societies. In the context of the pandemic, this need has been particularly acute. The team operates on the principle that of pairing more or less experienced polygraphers in relatively small teams, the members divide the work of lay out segmentation of documents transcription markup and revision, according to their respective skills and preferences also the wide variety of files that could be handled makes it easier makes it easy to recruit members with a wide range of skills and interest. Thus, yeah, perfect. Rather than being lost expertise in calligraphy is growing around the population. Eventually the group even hopes to offer sponsorship service for history students to help them develop their calligraphy still skills sorry for study project in in collaboration with professors. In addition, because the group operates relatively independently members are able to draw on other talents to improve the group's effectiveness and increase its impact. Some people will project many with project management experience are involved in structuring the groups activities others more familiar with computers are involved in developing the website and various tools to facilitate the work of the teams and ensure the specific flow of information at all levels in particular to avoid unnecessary duplication of work and communication with the researchers. Here you have an example of the website that they developed. Here, they are asking their volunteers to take snapshots of the different letters that they find in the Notarial Archives for one specific writer, and they concentrate all the information into their website so all the members can go to the website and have the information for. The, the advantage of the benefits of is of participatory science sorry without is important to researchers, because without having to organize and manage workflows, work planning task allocation review and correction, we can still use citizen science. It also allows the development of highly accurate recognition model very quickly. In this regard, the current objective of the garden at is to prepare the data for training models adapted to the most important series of notarial archives of who's registers often contains more than 2000 pages, sometimes around 1000 10 thousands, but not more than that so we will have to develop a lot of models and to be very precise and very acute. So we are starting a project to find out exactly the point where you reach the the highest level of efficiency for investing time and investing yourself in developing a model, but having the more acute model without going too far in investing time, money and participation so we have figured out, for instance that if you make small models, increasing the iterations is really not important if in fact it's worse. We have figured that after 100 or 150 epochs, you go very bad in your in your models. The most important thing is to increase the number of words into your data set, and also to have a good base model, which allows you with very few pages to get really high scores and also another important thing is to make a good sample of the documents into your collection to have a good variety of documents with a good lexicon that will be reproducible on your data. This can increase by twice the efficiency of model. So we hope to arrive soon with more precise data on this and thank you for your attention. Hello. Thank you for your very interesting talk where you've shown how to connect different stakeholders around historical documents which is also something that the read cooperative is all about. Are there any questions. Anything you would like to know. In regards to a pad, the permanent workshop. So you, you had three different segments of it the museum connected the, the students at the university and the summer session is that correct. They're all linked together so so if it is a student enrolled in a transcript this course during the school year and then completes the summer session and then presents their materials. They can do all three. Any other questions. Okay, sorry in advance it is not a transcript was related question at all, but I'm very interested you mentioned that you were able to locate where some minorities in Montreal, we're living and you reference it and how very able to do so. Like, do plots or houses have house numbers or not because in my own experience I know if there are no house numbers it's very challenging to locate plots in the city. Because we had in New France it was a signal or a system, and we have we call, we call it this literally the Montreal. So we know exactly where this owner has his land in the city, and also we have this database unique in the world also because one of the things that I didn't tell you that in all this project what we are going to do is create a link between all these database that we showed you, and we will have only one portal.  And what is fantastic with this development that we're doing with the map, the mapping. It's incredible. It's really incredible because, well I can talk to you about that in more details but it's on the way. To complete her answer about Terry, seniority were mapped also in 17th and 18th century so they were georeferenced. Okay. So, to understand this correctly the names of the landowners are connected with the parcels right. Oh, okay, so it's right in the document. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Wow, that's interesting. Yeah. Cool. Okay, then I think we need to move on to our last talk for this section. Thanks again. Wait just a second, please.


The Washington Census describes a set of policies that were pushed hard by the IMF and even more at one point by the World Bank during a period in which the developing countries and not least the African countries were in very great difficulty, economic difficulty. But well before that, there is a certain inbreeding among policy people in Washington within the Beltway as they say there. And it's very difficult to break out of that. I worked not only in wider, but in other places, notably the IDRC, the International Development Research Center of Canada, to build different patterns, different networks of thought and experience, so that it would not all derive from one central base, one center of thought, so that no matter what the policy issue, it would not be filtered through Washington and then brought back to you. So if Argentina had something happening, it got analyzed in Washington and its experience was fed to Nigeria from Washington, not from Argentina to Nigeria and back directly, which I think was unfortunate and was necessary to do something about. The principal issue was whether the stabilization programs were throttling the prospect of growth and development. In our earlier stages, we did not make as much of an issue of income distribution as UNICEF later did. We were before adjustment with the human face. Under UNICEF, with which I was also associated. In our day, in our project, it was mainly about, as in fact the developing countries group, the group of 24 had previously argued, about the need to sustain development, sustain growth and not throttle it. As if the IMF was asking people to hold their breath, to tighten their belts, but at some point you have to breathe again. It wasn't obvious that having tightened the belt, you would ever be able to breathe again. We tried to think through the investment implications, the longer term implications of the kind of gross throttling austerity programs that the IMF was demanding. In the case of this project involved some quite different modeling approaches, which IMF analysts thought peculiar at our final session in Helsinki, I guess in 1986, prior to the writing of Lance Taylor's summary volume, but after all 18 authors had done pretty close to a final draft, we invited two IMF research people. Should I name them? To the meeting. It was clear throughout that they thought we were wild. We were all pupils of Lance Taylor's strange ideas and why didn't we follow their orthodoxy? It actually in the final session of that conference in the meeting, it became very, very heated over a discussion on Argentina. And it became so heated that I was in the chair and the meeting couldn't stop. The time had come for the meeting to end. It was five o'clock, and everybody said, no, we can't stop. This has to go on. We have to hear. The Argentines were telling the IMF research analysts who had not been on the missions, who did not know what had actually transpired in detail. Whereas the Argentine, who later became a member of the wider board, actually, was directly involved, knew exactly what was going on, and was very angry and told the IMF people. So the meeting went on, and they finally told us they had to close the building. An hour and a half later, we finally stopped. But from that, largely I think from that, there came back to us the word that in Washington, other places, wider, was now known as wilder. My principal work, at least the places where I have lived and worked, were African, and the need for capacity was obvious as evident by the fact that I was being asked to do work that Africans should have been doing. I had no knowledge of the local background, history, culture, language. It was crazy for people like me, let alone IMF missions, to be trying to analyze complex policy questions in African countries. It was perfectly obvious that one had to build local capacity to make their own policy questions in their own interest. If you are in possession of technical tools that your adversary and an argument does not possess, you are able, and certainly in modern economics, to say, as Carlos would put it, hocus pocus mumbo jumbo, therefore you are wrong. And the essential thing was to build the capacity of people so that they could say, mumbo jumbo, hocus pocus, I have another result. And you require credibility in the profession of economics. You have to, even if you think the models are crazy, even if you think the assumptions are all screwed up, and even if you think it doesn't apply to the real world, you still need to be able to talk the language in order to be credible. And the hocus pocus mumbo jumbo was, I think, a perfect illustration of the kind of thing that was happening, particularly where I know best in Africa. Carlos was drawing on his Latin American experience, where missions would come in for two or three weeks, analyze the situation, produce results. And if you objected, you don't understand the model. This is our model. There would be a number of equations, actually very simple crude ones, were in use at that time. And that was it. You had no way in which you could argue back unless you had the relevant tool. There is a book put out by the IMF that I have edited. I chaired a meeting between the IMF and the governors of African Central Banks. They subsequently didn't ask me to do it again, but I was credible enough. So I did appear in lots of World Bank events, prominently appear. And in one drastic IMF one, to which I was not invited back, Robert McNamara was a supporter of wider. I don't know that this is widely known. And in the fall of 1985, Lal decided that he would reach out to many of his contacts in the public services of the world, as well as academics, and form an international advisory, international economic advisory group. These were people who would advise on projects in the international arena, not domestic poverty issues. And one of those who came at Lal's invitation was Robert McNamara. He believed, I think, that as many of us believed that it was not healthy for so much development expertise to be concentrated in one place, where there was inevitably, I mean, there were disagreements among World Bank personnel, but there was a certain brand, a certain party line, that it was dangerous to go too far away from. And he believed that that was unhealthy. It would be good for the world to have other places in which similar problems were addressed without the constraints that World Bank personnel faced, a place that was independent, academically oriented, but policy relevant. And he was quite keen on that. And in his later years, he was a more open-minded and I found him to be a good companion. I can't speak for his historical record, not all of which I approve of. But as a companion on UN committees and at this wider meeting, he was a pleasant person to be with. As the original project with Lance Taylor came to an end, I guess we both decided we would move to a second stage on medium term strategy. The original project was based on sheer stabilization. If you had raging inflation and the balance of payments problem was out of control, how did you deal with it? That was the original issue. Our second project was what do you do in the medium term, three, five years, something like that. And I joined that one and wrote the paper on trade, trade policy. Subsequent, well I guess by the end of that meeting, Lance decided he wanted to have another round featuring the role of the state and longer term, even longer term policy. At that point I thought I wanted to focus on trade. I had invested some in that, believed it to be important, believed there were many things wrong with the way in which it was being treated in policy. And at the end of that meeting on medium term adjustment, I sat down and wrote a proposal for a trade project. And that was an attempt first to challenge the theoretical base of current trade theory, trade policy, theory and policy. And secondly to once again draw on southern research people to analyze their own experience with trade and related policies with particular reference to industrialization, which was their prime concern in the discussions we had had. And from that came first a book on essentially theoretical base and then my favorite project which was the 18 country study each done by someone from the country which was a challenge to the then dominant view which was the product of an OECD study by Little Skatowsky and Scott, three eminent northern economists with no experience in 12 countries whatsoever. Our project was intended to challenge their conclusions which were very orthodox which were essentially free trade is good for you, liberalize as soon as you can, as fast as you can. All the problems developing countries were facing with a product of import substitution which had been a mistake, heavy protection that damaged their development prospects and liberalized trade was a solution to their problems. Of course I'm simplifying but that's the gist of what they had to say. We knew that there are many many choices between autarky, zero trade and free trade as in the stabilization project the essence of the findings was variety. Enormous range of policies many of which had nothing to do with trade that influenced the prospect of success or failure of industrialization and development more generally. There were many many policy tools even in the trade arena which were more complicated than the the orthodoxy made out. So the orthodoxy had a very oversimplified view that policies that had been pursued were anti-export and across the board this was damaging what we uncovered was in fact most countries had all kinds of pro-export policies in place to offset any anti-export bias and some of them are direct subsidies some of them may be illegal under the international rules but going forward nonetheless and all sorts of credit specialized credit arrangements to favor companies that needed help it was just a whole lot more complicated that the range of incentives within the incentive system that economics is supposed to be studying was enormous and could not be simplified into anti-export bias in import substitution moreover a lot of the import substitution had been very successful had generated success stories that eventually led to world competitive exports and the story was simply more complicated more diverse and above all to me the role of the exchange rate emerged as dominating all trade policy influences now this is a period of global economic turbulence study the studies we were doing during a period of really great global imbalances and we put it in the title of the book turbulent times and the variations in exchange rates and actually more accurately real exchange rates inflation adjusted exchange rate were very great and were typically greater than the height of the highest tariff so it wasn't about tariffs so much as about varying exchange rate if you really want to understand whether countries were making a success or not of their industrial policy in general the message was industrial policies go far beyond trade policy and the exchange rate the real exchange rate is enormously important particularly in times of global turbulence the new wider director at that time was andre cornea who was an old friend for whom i had written a nice letter of recommendation for his appointment at wider i know a marcheson wrote one too he had worked for unicef at a time when i was helping them as well and he asked me for ideas as to what wider might do and i i gave him a list of things i thought would be worth doing in all in the international arena finance and trade and he uh he called my bluff he he said well you know what are you you're giving this is what are you going to what are you going to do you want you have to do something what what would you what would you do with this and i looked again at the list and uh well uh the non-traditional exporting from africa had been something that uh had bothered me as a policy matter for for years and had kept coming up in a erc meetings uh the african economic research consortium where african research people presented their their research findings on on their economic problems the repeated uh repeated discussions of the need to develop something other than the primary products oil and minerals and agricultural products that were their base and um it seemed to me that a project that focused on how other countries had done it had moved as they had in southeast asia in particular would be useful for africa and i hoped to involve lots of african researchers in that project uh i did in the first instance i i think we started with eight countries uh but the limitations of data and uh quality of uh early uh inputs were such that we ended up with only five and half of the book that we produced uh was devoted to uh other countries in uh asia and central america that had successfully moved into new non-traditional exports uh but i think we did some uh some useful uh education capacity building in our in our meetings about about these matters even among those who did not complete the project with wider they i think they probably benefited from our discussion of what needed doing how to analyze it um i i i think so but but that book uh non-traditional exports has not uh to my mind been uh been one of the uh the better ones in which i was involved the ones i am proud to stop are the uh the one that lance taylor wrote in which my name isn't on uh but which i think i had some influence on and the the fat one on uh trade policy and industrialization in turbulent times which um had 18 country studies and and a great introduction uh summarizing it uh but which received no attention whatsoever in the academic world to my knowledge it was never reviewed in an academic journal i i never saw a review of it and uh partly to offset that uh lull or or perhaps someone else in wider decided it be a good idea to put out a discussion paper uh summarizing our results and i did that which i think was a pretty good uh summary of the project and what it found and i thought well at least this will get around and then i discovered that uh at that time uh wider's distribution uh list was was a problem i i started to ask my friends around the world what well what did you think of my paper my summer what paper they never heard of this paper wider's uh publications just didn't seem to be going where uh i thought they needed to go i think things have changed a lot since then and they uh outreach and impact uh uh dissemination is a huge issue which i did not understand during my years as an academic until much too late


Maintaining a so-called perfect weed-free and manicured lawn that takes a lot of time and money. So tonight let's talk about some alternative approaches and that we have Dr. Greta Gramick. Greta is an associate professor in the Department of Plant Sciences at NDSU and Greta, your life is so surrounded by weeds. It's just unbelievable. You teach courses on weed identification, weed biology, and weed ecology. Greta also conducts research on non-chemical weed management, integrated weed management, weed ecology, and also weed management in organic production systems. That's a lot of weeds, so you are the right person to talk about that. Greta, thank you and welcome to the forums. Okay thanks Tom for the introduction. I'd like to offer one caveat, which is that I am a weed scientist and not a turfgrass expert, but I got interested in this topic because I am an owner of a lawn.  We're going to start off by defining what ecology is. So ecology is a scientific discipline and as such ecologists are trying to understand the natural world by collecting data and testing hypotheses. Sometimes people get confused and they think that ecology is equivalent to environmentalism, but it's a formal scientific discipline. And to understand it a little bit we can break down the word ecology. It comes from two Greek words, oikos, meaning household, and logos, meaning study. And so our house is the planet earth, so we're studying everything and that's why ecology is a very difficult scientific discipline because everything is very complicated and there's lots of interconnections. Alright so that's the ecology part. What about a weed? If you ask people what's a weed, most people will tell you well it's a plant out of place. And that's a pretty good definition from some viewpoints. But there's lots of other ways of looking at weeds and so I want to go through these. The first is an anthropogenic viewpoint and that means from the humans viewpoint. And a plant out of place would be a definition of a weed that is based on this viewpoint and it has to do with our values and it says that weeds interfere with our objectives or our requirements, but that's not the only way of looking at a weed. There's also a biogeographical viewpoint that views a weed as an invader from a non-native introduced place. It's an alien and so a lot of our noxious weeds for instance are introduced from other places and that's one of the things that causes them to be invasive. And then finally there's an ecological viewpoint and this says that weeds are pioneers in succession or they're colonizers so the ecological viewpoint is defining weeds in terms of their function in ecosystems. They're just plants and they happen to evolve to fulfill certain roles and a lot of them are really good at colonizing disturbances and humans are good at disturbing things and so hence we have lots of weeds. So when we study weed ecology we're studying interactions. We're in the case of a crop land system we might be studying the interactions between crops and weeds, the animals in the system, the microorganisms in the system and also how all those things interact with the abiotic environment. So we use that understanding to create weed management approaches. So I thought I'd give you just a brief history of weed management before we talk about weed management approaches. Prior to 1946 weeds were mostly controlled mechanically and there were some inorganic herbicides like sodium arsenide, salts, acids but these were non-selective meaning they would damage all the plants. In 1946 with the introduction of 2-4-D we then had a synthetic herbicide that was selective. It would kill broadleaf plants but not grasses and that's extraordinarily useful for lawns and in crop land. So when we're spraying herbicides on our lawn we're spraying chemicals generally that will kill the weeds but not the grass. And then of course we had the GMO era and there are some turf grass plants, some turf grass grasses that are resistant to glyphosate but I won't talk about that very much. So herbicides work very well in crop lands and also in lawns but there are a lot of challenges to herbicide intensive approaches and especially with regard to lawns we have some environmental concerns, social and health concerns, and also maybe some economic concerns because it's expensive to spray all those chemicals. And so maybe we would be interested in formulating some alternative approaches and the concept of integrated weed management gives us a framework in which we can envision a more multi-tactic approach to managing weeds in lots of different types of systems but it would be applicable to lawns and integrated weed management tries to pull together a bunch of different tactics from four different categories physical, cultural, biological, and chemical. And the main philosophy is we want to use a variety of tactics because no one strategy is a silver bullet but we can do a lot of things together to achieve our management goals. So now I'm going to get into the part about lawns and I'm going to try to connect the ideas about weed ecology studying all these interactions, integrated weed management, lots of different things, and what we're doing with our lawns. But first a little bit of lawn history. So the earliest lawns were areas of low vegetation they usually weren't grass they might be things like creeping time or chamomile and these surrounded medieval castles in France and the UK and the function was to have some low vegetation so you could see the enemy coming to your castle. It wasn't until about the 17th century that wealthy brits adopted grass lawns that were closely shorn and because this was prior to the invention of the lawnmower they were often shorn by sheep and lawns eventually came to the United States but they were still really only for wealthy people. But there were a few things that happened that changed that one was urbanization leading to an interest in green spaces and parks and this included lawns and then the invention of the lawnmower facilitated mechanical management of these lawns and you didn't need to have sheep grazing them anymore and then finally and most importantly probably the development of suburbs in the 1940s and 50s led to widespread adoption of grass lawns by middle-class people and it was during this time that the idea of a perfect weed-free neatly manicured lawn became kind of a symbol of upward mobility because remember these lawns were once only something that the wealthy could have and furthermore these lawns would signify an admirable, upstanding moral character and anyone who has a neighbor has probably felt their neighbor's eyes on their yard and that you feel obligated to keep your yard a certain way so that your neighbors will be happy and that's kind of what I'm talking about. So that's what we're seeing here in the picture on the left. You've got this beautiful pure grass, it's shorn very closely and it's neatly edged, there's no weeds or any other plants to be seen and that's what people have come to view as beautiful and desirable. However, there are a lot of drawbacks to maintaining lawns like this. Lawns cover 40 million acres so what we're doing with our yards has a huge impact on the ecosystems, that's just in the United States and these yards are using 30 to 60 percent of our fresh water. We use 90 million pounds of fertilizer a year in the US, 78 million pounds of pesticides per year on our lawns and all of this costs 40 billion dollars per year. Furthermore our mowers emit tons of pollution as much as 34 cars because mowers don't have the same standards for emissions controls that automobiles have and also all that fertilizer use tends to result in runoff of nitrogen and about 40 to 60 percent of the nitrogen applied to lawns runs off into our surface waters and acts as a pollutant and so for all of these reasons people are trying to re-imagine what they could do with this space around their house called a lawn and I'm going to talk about a number of different ideas that people have about this re-imagination and one thing is that people are interested in growing food in their yards and there's a lot of advantages to this. Why grow food in a city lawn? It is a part of positive community development, it can contribute to education especially of disadvantaged people and children, you're reducing food miles, increasing access to fresh produce and the produce promotes human health. These gardens also provide ecosystem services like food for pollinators and they can also help regenerate wasted areas in cities like empty lots leading to improvements so there's a lot of reasons to re-imagine places that could be lawns as gardens instead but we also have all these lawns in the city and sometimes lawns and gardens don't mix very well. Last year in my garden I had a big beautiful strawberry patch and then in mid-June I came out one day and noticed that in the middle of my patch it was just brown and dead and it was caused by herbicide drips. Someone had sprayed their yard and then that herbicide had volatilized and drifted and hurt my strawberries and so maybe people don't realize this but herbicides that are used on lawns can move around and they move around via drift in the wind and also volatilization that occurs with heat and although some formulations are safer and less prone to volatilization, a lot of the forms that are used by lawn care services have this problem and it is very risky for a lot of ornamental and edible things that you might be growing around your lawn like grapes, tomatoes, beans, melons, and a whole host of horticultural plants like elders, maples, and roses. So in order to solve this problem we still want to control our weeds but maybe we'd like to cut down on some of this mowing and fuel use and nitrogen fertilizer use and pesticide use and so we can go back to what we know from ecology to find some answers and one thing that is a fundamental tenant in ecology is that nature abhors a vacuum. If there is an open niche then something is going to come in and in a lawn that is going to be generally speaking a weed so if you mow your grass way too short you are going to create spaces where weeds can come in. Another theory in ecology is that greater species diversity leads to more stability and greater stability leads to a resistance to being invaded by weeds so we can take these two principles and put them together with ideas from integrated weed management and come up with some new solutions for beautiful lawns. So on the left this is a picture of a lawn that was created using no-mow fescue species and these just grow to that height and you don't mow them at all and how it works is it's just a thick mat of turf and there's no vacuum a weed can't get in there and so you don't have to mow you don't have to put on herbicide easy peasy. Sure you have to get used to the fact that it looks a little different but it's still beautiful and green and you don't see any weeds in there. Another idea is to increase the diversity and one way you could do that is by adding white clover and so this is something that's gaining a lot of popularity. Clover used to be common in yards. When I was a child Dutch white clover was in every yard but then with the advent of using all these broadleaf herbicides in our yards to kill dandelions the clover went away. But now people are getting interested in bringing it back in and there are interesting new varieties of white clover. One is a micro clover that's a lot smaller than the typical Dutch white clover and all the clovers have advantages in that they reduce nitrogen use by one to two pounds per thousand square feet because these plants are legumes and they naturally fix nitrogen from the atmosphere. They create a lush dark green lawn. You can see in the picture how lush and green that clover area is. They do mix well most of the time with cool season turf grasses. Sometimes you might get a little bit of a dominance of the clover especially in lower nitrogen areas and to achieve this there's two different approaches. One you could start from scratch and plant grass seed that contains about five to ten percent clover seed by weight. Or you could seed into existing turf by mowing very closely then aggressively dethatching to open up some niches and then you would seed your clover in and water it well to get it established. So that's how you create this. There are a few drawbacks. Two-fourty will damage clover. MCPA is generally okay but the idea is really that you would want to get away from using herbicides in your yard. I have clover in my yard and I haven't used any herbicides in many years. Another possible detractant is that clover attracts bees which some people really appreciate because they want to help the pollinators but this could be an issue for people with bee sting allergies or perhaps people with children. Another advantage that I might mention is that clover is naturally resistant to pet urine. So if you have a dog and you're tired of all those yellow patches maybe a clover yard would be something that you could try. So some more ideas to cut down on the weeds and the mowing and the herbicide would be to mow a little less. In my yard I only mow once every two weeks. I let the grass just get a little bit longer. I aim for about four inches instead of one to two like most people aim for and that really helps out compete all those weeds. Another thing that you can do is early in the summer or late spring just go out and pull a few dandelions. I spent maybe two hours pulling dandelions in my yard last year and I never had to worry about dandelions again. My yard looked great and I didn't use any chemicals. Another thing that you can do to cut down on the fertilizer in addition to planting legumes like clover is don't remove the organic matter from your yard. It's valuable. It feeds your yard so instead of bagging your clippings use a mulching mower and let those clippings decompose back into the soil. Then in the fall and I tried this last year for the first time and it was really a lot of fun and so much less work than raking and bagging all those leaves. I just ran my mower over the leaves a couple of times and I found some research from the Michigan State University and they did this for two years and showed that after two years of mulch mowing leaves dandelions and large crabgrass were reduced by 100%.  To make it even better get an electric mower and then you're not polluting. So there's again lots of benefits of trying to have a more natural and ecologically balanced approach to lawn care. It's less costly, less laborious, it's safer for pets and children, you can reduce your fuel consumption and noise pollution, you won't harm your edible and ornamental plantings and it can be very beautiful if you can just shift your mindset away from the idea that a lawn has to be a perfect weed-free, closely mowed, grass-only situation. So those are the benefits but there are some barriers to adopting this kind of lawn care. Your nata-bers may not understand and they may be upset with you. If you're growing your vegetation taller than 8 inches high, many city ordinances including Fargo I know does prohibit that kind of vegetation. Moorhead, Minnesota on the other hand has a natural lawn care program and you can apply to the city to do almost anything that you want, you just have to present them with a plan that they then approve. But if your city doesn't have that option, what can you do? You can talk to your friends and neighbors and tell them what's great about what you want to do with your yard and then you can also, in the process of changing attitudes, maybe work to change your city ordinances so that you can have a program like Moorhead, Minnesota does. And I think that's all I have for you. I hope that you guys will enjoy trying to take a more natural approach to lawn care and if you have any thoughts or questions I would be happy to address them. Okay Greta, we've got some questions already for you. The first question has to do with that fast duty you mentioned. And is it hardy in this climate and how tall does it get to grow? How tall does it reach? Well I don't know. I don't know if it's hardy in this region. And as far as how tall it gets, I think it's meant to only get about 6-8 inches tall and in the picture you could see that it wasn't especially tall. It tends to sort of fall over and mat down. There are some, fescus can be more warm season and so you might look into it but there may be different varieties that would be suitable to cooler climates. Yeah, you mentioned Nomo Fescu. That's kind of a trade name and I know a prairie nursery used to offer Nomo Fescu. You just showed a beautiful picture of it and I think it's hardy in zone 4 at least. So that's something to investigate. That's good to know. There are a lot of interesting clover that you stimulated. Does clover do well in part shade? I think that it would do okay about as well as turf grass. In super shady areas it's probably not going to be that happy. You know you talk about how plants compete with one another. How do dandelions compete with clover? You know what I've noticed in my yard is that the dandelion, there's some areas where the clover patches are really thick and there seem to be fewer dandelions in those areas than in the areas that are more pure grass. So I think that the clover is a pretty good competitor against the dandelions but if you stop using the chemicals altogether you're probably always going to have a few dandelions and that's why I usually just go out and pull a few of them out and keep on top of it that way. The real key is to mow at a higher height. That's what really helps keep those dandelions down but if you already have a lot of dandelions you might benefit from pulling a few of them out in the spring. Okay how about you know another problem with clover they say is that stains the kids clothes more when they roll the bread. Does it stain the grass? I don't have kids so I don't have kids with that. I love it when my kids come home with stains in the yard. That means they're active and having a great time outside. I think tight and most other normal stain or detergents will get out clover stains. It's not going to ruin your clothes. Why do those weeds grow so much faster than the plants that you want? You're trying to grow. That's a question. If you go back to my definition of a weed as being an ecological definition that's based on the function of a plant and that a lot of weeds are colonizers and the reason that they are good colonizers is that they grow very quickly and they make up nitrogen very fast. That's their function to grow fast to cover an area that's disturbed to hold it in place until the slower growing more slowly establishing plants have time to come in. That's what it means to be a pioneer of succession and so a lot of weeds grow very well to nitrogen. A lot of studies have been done about this in crop land. They've showed that weeds like pigweed and lamb's quarters benefit from extra nitrogen much more than crop of wheat would. That's one reason why people got interested in using banded applications. That doesn't have anything to do with the yard applying a lot of nitrogen fertilizer to your yard. You're just encouraging the weeds almost more than the grasses depending on what the weed species is. Let's keep moving through these questions. There's someone who lives in western North Dakota and they're looking for a recommended grass seed that can especially be useful in lowering their water usage. I wouldn't be able to answer that question like I said. I'm not really a turf grass expert and so I don't know that much about specific varieties. I think that most grasses need some water and that's why in areas that don't have a lot of water like in California or New Mexico you're generally recommended to do something else like it's called xeriscaping where you would grow plants that are really suited to drier conditions. If I lived out in western North Dakota where they get 10 inches of rain a year I might try doing something like that if I was tired of watering constantly. I think that would be a lot more ecologically sound. I think most grasses are going to need some water. I think you had some good points also about management like if you mow tall the tall turf will naturally shade the soil and keep it moist and also when you let the clippings fall that will be a natural mulch that can reduce water use. I would have this gardener consider incorporating some crested wheat grass which is a xeriscape drought tolerant grass and that's pretty common out here in the west to add that to your bluegrass mix. Do you want to talk about how we control creeping Charlie Greta? Yeah, the one thing that I've heard that works for that is using a borax solution. Have you ever heard that Tom? Yes, borax is actually creeping Charlie is especially sensitive to borax and although borax it's not labeled for use as a herbicide so we can't officially recommend it you can find information this started from Iowa State over 20 years ago how they discovered this and there's recipes that can help this to suppress creeping Charlie but I also like your idea Greta as far as I think creeping Charlie is not the ugliest weed out there.  Yeah, it's in the mint family. People use it for tea. How about that? Greta the problem with your natural lawn you're going to attract too many bunnies Oh yeah, well I actually I like it because the bunnies stay out of my garden eating the clover in the yard so if you're trying to grow vegetables in your garden it might actually be helpful to keep the bunnies out of your lettuce but yeah it's true that the rabbits like the clover quite a bit but we can deter that by putting a fence around the garden then we get the best of both worlds. We can have lettuce and clover How about the question here I'm going to kind of maybe focus on questions the question about lawn grass and mosquitoes have you had any experience with that Greta you have more of a mosquito issue in the tall turf I don't think that would really be an issue I mean we don't agree in standing water so unless whatever you're doing is generating standing water I don't think that it's going to affect the mosquitoes very much Have you had any experience with use of fine fescue as a low input lawn product I haven't that's less that requires less input and it's more suited for shaded areas so if you've got a shaded area a fine fescue can work there Another zero escape grasses include blue grama grass or buffalo grass Have you had any experiences with that Greta I've seen a lot of prairie grasses and I would think that they wouldn't look quite like a typical yard and they might be more difficult to establish but it's possible I think that the crusted wheat grass is really a better idea for the Dickinson Research Extension Center for example a lot of their grassy borders have a lot of crusted wheat grass and it seems to do really well but I don't see those other types of grasses Those native grasses they tolerate warm weather better so what happens is my neighbor has buffalo grass growing up in spring and it looks good for a couple months of summer but then it gets turns yellow quickly again so be aware of that those are warm season grasses We don't have any recommendations about the best clover varieties How would you go about handling that Are there lawn varieties of clover Well there's the regular Dutch white clover and then there's this micro clover that I'm talking about and I don't know if they're different species there's certainly different varieties and I think people are interested in the micro clover because it's shorter and you might be able to have created 100% clover yards that you don't have to mow Ok so I think that's a new term I learned tonight micro clover so I think that's something to think about and to focus on and you wanted to keep your vegetation below that 8 inch limit that most municipalities require then if you grew the micro clover it would just naturally be short and you wouldn't have to mow so much at all How about I know you're a Canadian thistle expert this person keeps dropping Canadian thistle they keep cutting at ground level and it just keeps coming back up but it still comes back Maybe they should watch the presentation 2 years ago about how to control I wonder how big of a patch it is I don't know Well I guess in terms of things that are legal there's probably not a lot that you can do as far as herbicides go If it's not that big of a patch and you're really determined to get rid of it you could spray it with Roundup Spray it One thing about treating Canada thistle is it really matters when you treat it and so if you spray it in the fall that's when the plant is translocating sugars down into the roots for fall storage and so it will suck that herbicide down into the roots and kill the roots more So you might try altering when you're spraying it and then if that doesn't work and it's not that big of a patch I've had some luck with getting rid of Canada thistle using putting down some heavy landscaping fabric and then a bunch of organic mulch on top of that and just smothering it for a couple of years and that might get rid of it if you're willing to put up with that unsightly mulch in your yard if it's not that big of a patch but Canada thistle is a tough one It's almost a signal to me that generally speaking Canada thistle shouldn't be in turf grass healthy turf grass I don't think of as being invaded by Canada thistle all that readily and to me that's kind of a sign that maybe there's some underlying reason why the grass isn't as healthy as it could be that too What about this person worried about disturbing the hibernating pollinators in the lawn should they wait until the weather is consistently above 50 degrees before they work the lawn have you heard about early working the lawn hurt hibernating pollinators I wouldn't worry about that I don't think it's going to have that big of an impact and I'm not sure that they're really hibernating in the lawn necessarily Red clover wouldn't be as good because it's not as it's much taller and it doesn't form a turf like surface I like red clover in other places I like it as a plant it's great to plant it in alfalfa to add a little diversity to alfalfa but as far as a legume in a yard I wouldn't recommend that one okay so now I'm just going to tell the youtube users Bob that someone has a question about Bermuda and St. Augustine lawn my goodness that's not North Dakota that's down south okay well zone 5 at least I don't know but they will have Alan Zook in about a week or two he can talk about general lawn same with using trichoderma or Baxillus in the lawn so I think let's try to stay on time tonight and thank you Greta for your presentation very much it was really very interesting I gotta say thank you very much you're welcome have a good evening everyone


Have you ever asked yourself, am I toxic? If so, then you are taking a step in the right direction. Being self-aware is the first stage of acceptance that you and everyone around you are imperfect. Sometimes you don't notice that your habits are harmful to you and your loved ones, and that's why it's good to learn more about them and how to reduce that behavior. So here are six signs that you are unintentionally toxic, but not malicious. 1. You make a lot more promises than you can keep. Do you have a habit of promising a lot of things? Things like, I promise I won't tell anyone your secret, but then you end up slipping it out later on. If you tend to over-promise and under-deliver, you might not notice that you are being unintentionally toxic. Generally, over-promising stands from our desire to be liked or accepted, but this can damage your relationships and even your reputation. In order to break away from this habit, it helps to take your time before promising something. Try considering, will you be able to stand by it? What are its consequences if you do break them? By identifying these things, you will know the weight of what you're about to promise. Be straightforward and communicative about your limits. They'll understand your side as long as you're clear about it. 2. You use pity to get the things that you want. Do you find yourself using other people's pity or guilt? Things like, I feel so tired of doing everything in this house. If only someone could help me with the dishes, that would be great. Or maybe, it's been so long since I had time for myself and I still have to be on duty tonight. Just debate someone else and taking your shift out of pity? These actions are a form of manipulation and it also stems from you not knowing how to ask for help directly. You probably aren't used to opening up. This can lead others to see you as selfish or outright manipulative. It's helpful to know when to ask for help directly. Other people will understand. And when you reach out for help, it shows that you trust them. Be respectful, consider it, yet straightforward enough to get your point across. Don't be afraid to take help and be generous in giving it. 3. You're defensive. Do you notice that you're constantly blaming people or outside factors? Blaming is an easy way out. We make someone or something else responsible, rather than owning up to our past. You may feel inclined to do so because you want to prove that you're right, to the point where you victimize yourself. But sometimes being right doesn't solve the situation. What was the problem in the first place? What can you do to fix it? Try to think as a team rather than calling out individual faults. There are always multiple sides to a situation. So the next time you find yourself in this situation, try asking yourself. How can you be better? By doing so, you're taking part of the blame and working to find a better solution. 4. You're overly sensitive. Do you feel like you need to have a response to everything? When you're too sensitive, you may feel like everyone is against you. Or that what they say is a confrontation to your existence or belief. Being too sensitive may be caused by low self-esteem. You may feel like you have to be constantly on the defensive. This usually stems from a rough childhood upbringing. If you were constantly ridiculed about things you didn't have control of, chances are you grew up with insecurities over them. In trying to heal from becoming too sensitive, it's good to be self-aware. Acknowledge your tendencies and attempt to not defend yourself against them. Indulge in what self-care means to you. Identify which parts of yourself you like and focus on them. Once you have a healthy view of yourself and identity, you'll be more than capable of shrugging other people's opinions off. 5. You're exceedingly pessimistic. Are you the type of person who always expects the worst outcome? Let's say someone compliments you. Do you simply appreciate the gesture or think that there's something more behind it? Being pessimistic means that you always see the negative side of things.  It may be that you're pessimistic for the sake of being practical and realistic, but sometimes it's good to let loose and have fun. Plus, being too negative can cause stress, anxiety, and depression. There are always better ways to approach situations rather than being pessimistic. Try to run words in your head first before saying them out loud. Do you think it would ruin the mood? If so, then there's probably a better way and time to say it. Developing a positive mindset is a conscious effort. Look at solutions instead of potential problems. That way, you're not wallowing in the bad stuff. Lastly, it's best to surround yourself with supportive, understanding, and optimistic people. 6. You rely on others for validation. When you're too caught up in other people's opinions to the point where you plan your life around being complimented, you may not notice that you're being toxic. Not to them, but to yourself.  Every part of you is important. But if you need other people to say it before you can feel validated, you may be facing insecurities due to low self-esteem. If you notice yourself relying on other people's views more than your own, try to take a step back and examine why you feel that way. Do you want to feel accepted? Is your own opinion not enough on this matter? Why do you think so? Take small, conscious steps to a happier self to rely less on outside validation. It can work wonders. Did you relate to this video? Remember that you're not a bad person if you can relate to these signs. You're already better by educating yourself about it. Do you have experiences with friends who are being unintentionally toxic? How do you handle them? Share your experiences in the comment section below. We appreciate hearing your stories. Leave a like and share this video with a friend if you think it'll help them. As usual, all references are in the description. Thanks for watching. Until next time.