Welcome back to the solutions to the questions of the month series of videos. This time I will deal with the questions that were asked by our YouTube channel community in February 2013. And as usual, I will present the answers using the active board behind me, whose content can be downloaded via the e-lecture library on the VirtuaLinguistics campus. Here is the first question. Is it true that a linking R can't occur after E and O and that this has something to do with a hiatus? Well, in order to answer this question, which certainly focuses on received pronunciation, we should first of all define the context required for the effect of linking. What do we need? We need a word that phonemically ends in a vowel and involves a final or penultimate orthographical R. So, here are two words. And in isolation, their orthographical R is not realized, so we have mother and here. But if the next word starts with a vowel, we get mother and father, or here it is. To come back to our question, we first of all need to define words or contexts with a final monothongal E and O. And at the same time, these contexts should involve an orthographical R. So we need contexts of this kind, final E plus R, final O plus R. But such contexts simply do not exist. In contexts with final O and final E, we have other linking elements that gap the hiatus. For example, the glide Y in we all and the labial vela glide as in you all. So this explains why we do not get a linking R in these contexts. Here is the next question. I do not understand why there's a problem with I promise I'll come to your party. Please clarify. Well, in the e-lecture pragmatics and overview, I said that the act of promising normally involves that the address C wants the promise to be realized. So we want this smiling face over here.  Do you really want me to be at your party? Many students would rather dispense with me in which case the speech act could be understood as a threat rather than as a promise. But if you were looking forward to my presence, then you would like the promise to be realized and we would have a true promise. Thus various conditions have to be met before a speech act can be said to have been properly performed. Basically, these happiness, felicity or appropriacy conditions ensure that the proper context is matched with the proper words. So there's not a problem with promise, but just the option to understand this speech act in more than the standard way. Here is a completely different question, a more general question. Do you offer PhD programs in applied linguistics online? Well, we feel extremely honored by the fact that the users of our channel are interested in doing an online PhD with us. In fact, we do offer PhD programs at our department of the University of Marburg that you can see over here. But there are no particular classes you would have to attend if you are interested in such a program. So if you wish, that is some sort of online program. However, in order to apply for a PhD with us, you need a profound linguistic background. For example, a master degree in linguistics. Well, and then secondly, your research project should satisfy our goals. It should fit into our goals. Language in linguistics, web technology and digital teaching and learning scenarios in the 21st century apply to languages, language, studies or linguistics. By the way, if I may add this, we have an online on the job master program. Anyone interested? Well, there's more information on the homepage of the virtual linguistics campus, which are displayed over here. Here is another question. Well, it's not really a question. Now, this is a highly interesting thing. It relates to the video, to our video about the virtual linguistics campus educational scenario, which we refer to as the inverted classroom mastery model. Up to now, we thought that the roots of this model do not go back further than the year 2000, when Maureen Lake, Glenn Platt and Michael Tregler published their inverted classroom essay in the Journal of Economic Education. But this comment here pointed out to us that there are even further roots. The inverted classroom mastery model is an enhanced modified Keller paradigm used in the United States in selected universities in the late 1970s and early 80s. Now, when we read this comment, we tried to find more details. And then eventually we found the publication by a man called Fred Keller, goodbye teacher. And if you examine Fred Keller's ideas, there are indeed some sort of precursors to the inverted classroom model using material that was available at the time for the self-guided phase of content acquisition, film, audio, field trips, pictures, and so on and so forth. So we are extremely grateful for comments of this type. They assure the quality of what we are doing and they trigger new ideas. A more down to earth question is this one. Where can I find the interactive consonantal chart you showed in this video? By this video, of course, the video about consonants is meant. Now in order to use the consonantal chart and a large number of free options, you have to have an account on the virtual linguistics campus, which is of course free. So please register first. Visit our homepage and create your free VLC account. Click on this button and then here you create your free account. Once you've created your account, log in with your freely created access data, normally your email address and a password. And then after log in, you will see your personalized VLC start site. And on the start site, you have various options among them the VLC assessment showcase, the e-lecture library where you find our videos at the bot content, and last but not least, the VLC toolbox. And within the toolbox, you will find a link labeled consonants. Just click on it. The rest is self-explanatory. Well, that's it for now. And as usual, I'd like to thank all our subscribers and users. Here are those whose questions I tried to answer. Their questions and comments contribute to the quality of our channel and are helpful for all of us. Well, and comments like this one over here are particularly motivating. Georgia Jimenez, I hope I pronounced her name correctly. Right. Sir, thank you for this very precise explanation. I'll use it and share it in my applied linguistic class. I hope I can report it the way you did it. Well, this is exactly what we want to achieve with our videos. Use them in your class. Use them to prepare certain topics. And if they help to improve your grades, well, that's even better. Well, and if we make mistakes, you'll be there in order to correct us. And that's exactly what we want. Motivation and quality assurance by the community. So see you again in the next questions of the month video or in any of our e-lectures. Until then, have a nice time.


What types of sources are in the library that help you find information on a topic you know little about? Did you think of books? Most people do. We also have magazines, newspapers, videos, audiobooks, and more sources of information available in the library. In order to support college level research, you can access credible academic content through our subscription databases. In the first part of your research project for ENC 1101 online, your task is to choose a controversial topic from the opposing viewpoint database and to develop a thesis statement. You can access the databases through the library's website. You just have to know how to get there and how to log in to search. I will show you how to get to the library's databases and log in now. If you are able, please open a new window and keep this video up in a separate window. This way you can follow along as I give you instructions to locate and log in to the databases. Control plus N will open a new window. Then if you click on restore down on each window, you can place them side by side. Pause the video and set up your computer now. Starting out at the IRSC homepage, you can get to the library by clicking quick links and then libraries in the top right corner. Next, click on databases by subject. You can then either select current events or the O to get to opposing viewpoints. Click on one of these and scroll down to see the opposing viewpoints database. Log in using the same Rivermail email and password that you use for my pioneer portal. If you experience any errors when logging in, please email us at library at irsc.edu. There is also a troubleshooting page on the main database website for you. This database makes it easy to pick a topic as it lists some current and controversial topics under browse issues. Click on browse issues to see a list of topics. The topics listed here are very broad and your job in this first assignment is to use the database to help you narrow down your choice to a viewpoint or one side of an argument that is tied to a broad topic. For example, let me show you how this works. If you're interested in mental health in general, you can read an overview of this topic by clicking on read more to start to get some ideas on what specific aspect you would want to focus on within this broader topic. Then, if you go back one page, you can click on viewpoints to see over 100 articles that have information on various controversial points of view as it relates to mental health. As you can see, this list of viewpoints can also help to narrow my focus. I would explore issues related to the care given to military veterans and how that helps with PTSD or I could explore mental health issues or the use of animals and mental health therapy programs. If you see a viewpoint you like, click on the title to read the article associated with this topic in order to help you in this discovery process. If you find that the first topic you selected is not a controversial issue you would like to explore in this project, then you would return to the main page and select another potential topic. Let's review those steps. I'm going to go back to the main page and show you one other broad topic and how to use the sources in it to narrow down your topic. Click on browse issues and look through the list of possibilities. Choose something else that interests you. I'm going to select food insecurity, then click on read more for the topic overview. This is going to give you the background information you need to post your brief reflection on what you have learned and explain why this topic matters to you. Through your review of this topic, you will be able to propose your working thesis statement. Take time now to review the wide range of topics available to you in this database in order to complete this step of your research project.


We are buying everything in our one color. My color today is going to be orange. My color today is going to be pink. Good practice, babe. I should have really bought my color. You should have. I literally have nothing that's orange. Oh, that's orange. Should I buy it? I'm out of pink chair. Look at me, I'm pinked out. I've already one step ahead of you. This actually is super close. I'm nervous. How many did you think I had? What is good, model squad? Welcome back to our channel. As you can see by this video title, we are buying everything in our one singular color. You guys love these videos, so we're bringing it back. We're starting off right at Starbucks. At Starbucks, we are just coming home from the gym. And if you don't subscribe to our channel, you don't know, we literally get Starbucks every single day. Now, the tricky part is my color today is going to be orange. And my color today is going to be pink. Obviously, we're not in our peril. Not yet. But the tricky part is finding something orange to drink at start. I don't even know if they have anything orange, so wish me luck. Just get a pumpkin. A pumpkin, what? A pumpkin latte. Pumpkin, what? Pumpkin's orange. Pumpkin lattes. You didn't like that one when we had it last week? Not really. All right, well, let me just, we'll see. I want a pink drink and a mozzarella panini. That's not pink. Can I get one pink cake pop? Okay. And then, can I also get a pumpkin scone for the drink? Can I get a pink drink with no berries and light ice? And then, can I get a pumpkin spice latte? I'm kinda jealous. Go with the hot or ice? I'll do it iced. All right, and then can I get a caramel macchiato? Thank you. Y'all, I couldn't get my tomato mozzarella panini. So I told her, she literally, Mariah literally said, I'm starving. I'm getting a tomato mozzarella panini. I'm like, babe, it's not pink. You're supposed to only order the stuff in your color today. Who wants a cake pop for breakfast? I know, I like it, but. You're doing one today, so. Mine is kind of more brown, but it's called a pumpkin spiced latte. I think it's still counts because pumpkin is orange. Come on, it's pumpkin spiced. And it's pumpkin spiced, but I am actually low key jealous. And then obviously we have our cake pops in here, and then we got bills, what is it called? It's a pumpkin scone. If you did not see our vlog channel, trying every bald menu item at Starbucks, we ate a pumpkin scone. I'm kind of regretting being pink today. I really wish I was orange because I feel like I'm more of a folly type person than Bill. Yeah, we're gonna have to do something. And I'm jealous. You can eat ham.  All I can say is good luck, Mariah, today because I'm gonna be winning this challenge. If any of us break and order anything that's not our color, you automatically lose. I'm gonna win. You're not gonna win. Because Team Mariah, you guys already know, pulls through with any videos. Sorry. I'm not even gonna say anything, but let's just find out. Look at Mariah up here with a pink cake pop. All right, I see you. Good breakfast, babe. Good nutrition. Get some cake in for the morning. I should have redot my color. You should have, Mariah.  Just wait until we go to the store and, excuse me, what are you wearing? Oh, actually, you wanna listen to me? What? I know where I can get a lot of pink stuff at. You're not shopping online. Alta. No, I don't wanna go into Alta. No. You gotta get, like, pink if you want it. All right, love you to say, this is not orange, guys. I literally have nothing that's orange. First mission of the video, we're gonna go to Target and get orange drip. He cannot find an orange. If you cannot find a cute orange shirt, you're losing the challenge. I'm gonna try to get an orange tracksuit. I'm gonna try to get it. Hold on, hold on. You're saying on this, if you cannot find an orange shirt, T-Mariah wins this victory. Wait, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Because you are not wearing the apparel. I thought you were, no, I thought you were. You are not wearing the apparel, so if you do not find it. No, okay, well, I'm gonna be finding it. I don't care if it's in a toddler size.  But, I wanted to show you guys my orange scone. I know it kinda looks brown, but this is actually orange. Mariah's running to the bathroom right now, for some reason. But, I got my scone here. I got my pumpkin latte now. All I gotta do is get an orange shirt and I will be safe. Wish me luck. All right, guys, before we get on to going shopping, this man, I don't know where he is, he's hiding because he is mad. You're doing a garbage. I'm actually providing for our family. So, as you guys can see, I got the pink makeup going on, my pink lipstick. I got my pink shirt. And guys, I'm already beating Bill. You're not beating him. I'm at a pink chair. Ow, look, I got the pink iPhone. I got my pink computer. You didn't buy those. You didn't buy those today though. It doesn't matter. I'm already one step ahead of you. Tima Riot is already winning. I have more pink. Look it, I have Louis Vuitton. Yeah, this beats all that. That's more expensive than all that combined right there. Anyways, I just wanted to brag and show you guys what's going on here. Cause you know, I got the pink makeup. Everything's pink today. This video is about buying pink and orange things. I'm already one step ahead of you. You, okay. Just cause you have more pink. Where's your orange shirt? Okay, it's at Target. It's at Target. I'm finding an orange shirt. Tima Riot is already winning. Stop saying, no, you're not. Stop. No. All right, so we just got to Target. And it's honestly not looking good, but I'm going to find something. Like just do a quick glance. Do you see anything orange in this guy's section? There's not one thing. Wait, there's a Halloween shirt over there. But that's for, that's for women. No, that's for women though. Not wearing that. I'm just so embarrassed. Okay, no guys, I'm going to find an orange shirt. I see some reds and I see some, literally every color except orange here. It's October. It's fall. I'm not losing. It's your choice to pick. You picked orange. I'm not losing guys.  I'm going to find something. Look at this. Literally, do you see one thing orange? Except, no, that's tan. There's not one. Wait, actually. Oh my God. I'm actually going to flip out right now. All right, please don't laugh. This is the only thing that I found so far. That's orange. Actually, that's not bad. That's kind of nice. Ew.  Mariah, come here. What about this? This is perfect. Does it meet your standards? For some reason, Mariah has such high standards for me. You like this one better than the nice shirt that I found? Yes. All right, I'm getting this then. Throw it in the cart. Throw it in the cart. I'm buying it. I'm buying it and I don't lose the challenge now because remember I actually shook on it. So, still in the game. The only bonus thing, I did not realize how many things do not come in orange. Like orange is hard, but the only bonus thing is Halloween section is basically all orange. Look at that. Wait. Oh, that's orange. Should I buy it? I don't know if we're at our front yard. I don't think they even have any of them. All right, my next purchase on the list, I'm not even gonna question it. I'm buying orange pumpkins. Okay, guys, the orange guys the most and their color has the most of them all. And I'm winning, so. No, I think I'm winning. No, I'm winning. I got the scone, the drink, my shirt. But the one's at home. You didn't buy those. You did not buy those. It's all about buying. Nope, doesn't count. Nope. So, I also got an orange bag of chips and the one thing that I see, Mariah, oh, what's that? Pink. I was gonna say, the one thing that I see, Mariah first, is the smallest. I don't know what this is, but it's a raspberry rose.  That's awesome though, so. Hey. I'm still winning though, so. Not yet, not when I get done. So guys, Bill is not in this aisle, but this is like the candy aisle, so I can get a bunch of things pink. I already got two things right here. You got more stuff? I got more stuff, dude. There's so many pink stuff in here. Look, I got the watermelon slice, it's been a pink bag. Come on. You can't go wrong with some Swedish fish, boom. Wait, did you just say Swedish fish? Oh. That was goldfish. Goldfish, Reese's, boom, it's orange. We got some Yum Yum licorice, but you know what? I'm actually gonna buy what I see, because I'm gonna actually eat it. Do you see how good these look? Ew. That looks disgusting. Hey, it's orange and I'm winning today, so let's go with the color. I don't think, so I think Timurra is gonna pull through, whether you wanna believe it or not. You're the one that only has five things. Oh, look at this. Look at this. They're strawberry checks.  It's pink, right? You said pink. But you're not gonna eat it. Oh, I'm gonna eat it. All right, we'll see.    Well, you're talking about grabbing anything that you can see orange. Well, I'm gonna grab everything I can to win. Where do you think I'm talking about? I'll take this for myself, because you know it's pink. Where's your orange? Oh, shoot. Right here, I thought there was- Just because you grabbed two, that's the one. I know, that counts as two. No, it counts as one. Yes, it counts as two. So I need to grab another pink one to compete with you? I don't care, whatever you want. You can grab 10 of them, that's part of the game. I was gonna grab this, though, but there's no orange in it, so.  All right, guys, so we just got done at Target. I feel like it came to a close. You actually grabbed a lot of stuff. I didn't. I didn't. I didn't. It's the candy aisle that gets you here. It's the candy aisle, but I got some pretty healthy candy. Like, there's a healthy candy that only has three grams of sugar. I don't know how good they're gonna be, but we are going to Ulta. You can buy products there, babe. I'm going to be, but I don't want to. I'm just doing it to Ulta. But I forgot that we are going to Ulta, so I'm gonna beat him. I'm gonna get a lot of pink stuff. You know, it's a girly store.  We are gonna win. Rock-a-let team, Bill. Okay, look at orange. See, orange. He says that counts, yep. But my chair and my laptop don't count. Okay. All right, so this is me and my shirt. Mariah hates it. I think it's kind of a vibe, like October vibes. It's not as bad with this on button, though. No, it's just not my favorite. Come on, it peeps the muscle, babe. Look at the muscles. Right, look at the muscles. She's too busy looking at her pink. Look at this. She found the pinkest aisle in here. And what? That's not, no. You already have lip injections. You already have lip injections. You're done with the lips. I know, I'm looking at a minute. Unless it's lip gloss, that's all you can get. I am cutting it off there. Good news, though. I do see a lot of orange stuff in here. Maybe I'll buy it and then give it to Mariah as a gift after this video. But holy crap, the lighting is amazing in here. Look at this, Mariah. We need to be like this in our house. Dude, we have to do that. We should start filming at Alta's from now on, but I have yet to see you grab anything. Please, you're cute. Like, you're just looking at stuff. You know, you're supposed to just be throwing things in there. Well, I'm looking, because I don't want to buy stuff that I don't want. You know what I mean? All right. All right, what two things are you putting in the cart? So, I got three things. Oh, you got three? So, I got the Kylie lipstick plus lip liner. Okay. And then I got a gloss. Oh, I need to catch up. And then I got a Kylie Jenner bronzer. See, this is so hard because there's literally limited orange stuff here. There is more here than like any other store, really. But like, I just don't know what to get because I'm not going to use any of this. Should I get like, what is this? Yeah, we're getting that creamy body wash, babe. Yeah, you're going to be living that up. Hey, baby, can get on. Ooh, what is this? Why are you helping me? But was it? Clinique for men. Wait, it's for men? What does it do? Oh, you have to get, I don't know what it does. It's a super energizer. Eye gel. Oh, we're getting the, wait, it says display, though. Oh, we're here. Oh my gosh. Marvel Squad. Firm men. Are you kidding me? Boom. I just made bills the whole day. Crew, this is like hair paste. Okay, get it. I could actually use it. I didn't even know they sold stuff for men here. Wait, what? It's a facial place. And like face stuff. What guy do you see ever going here? Literally none. I could point out zero total people are here right now. This is lit. I'm already tired with you here. Oh, we're not taking an L. Marvel Squad. Stay tuned, get ready. I might even get some lip liner stuff here. I don't know. Make it a rule that everything you buy here, you have to test out. So I have to test out anything that I buy. I'm smelling perfumes. Ooh, this is orange. Do you want some of this? No. Smell it. It might smell good. I can buy it for you. Yeah? No? Excuse me, this is black. Okay, no. I don't know what. Do you want me to show them the palette? It's pink. It's flirt. It's not all. You promise? Hold on, wait. You need an orange beauty blender. And I also got a pink beauty blender, guys. But you need an orange one as well, so. But that is not pink. The packaging is not pink, babe. Okay, let me see. Let me define this. All these shades are pinky. Technically, some of these are an orange tint. So I could have bought that too. Well, it's still mine. You are right though. This is mostly pink, but that is, that's still. You got lucky. I won. All right, so this is the last thing that we're getting. I really don't know. Also, I don't know if I showed you guys, but I just, I did. Oh yeah, and she got a perfume. So I don't know how many of each that we have. We're just gonna check out, move on, and hope for the best. We're gonna count me at home. I really have no idea who's up or who's down. So this could be anyone's ball game. All right, we're finally out of Ulta, $330 later. We are at McDonald's and I am looking for orange stuff. Give me a four-piece chicken nugget. Can I get one four-piece chicken nugget? Wait, why? Chicken nugget. All right, any stuff? And then a strawberry banana smoothie. And then a strawberry banana smoothie. Good thing. Unfortunately, at the moment, we don't have any smoothies. What about shake, a strawberry shake? Do you have any shakes? Yes, we do. I'll do strawberry shake. All right, anything else? And then can I do a spicy chicken sandwich? And that'll be it. Yeah, so the chicken was- You're right. No, the chicken's pink before they cook it. And you technically buy it before it's cooked. You already know. All right, so we just got home and let me just tell you, I just noticed Ulta got the memo. They put our stuff even in an orange bag. So they already, I feel like are picking a winner, babe. Okay, so from the looks of this, this actually is super close. You have a ton of stuff that you bought at Ulta. I have, wait. Look at my pink shake. Hold on, we need to count this up. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. Did you get the gun? 17. Oh my God. Did I count this? Yeah, you did count that. So you have 17. I'm nervous. How many do you think I have? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. I won! Wait, what about Starbucks? What about Starbucks? 15 was my scone and 16. Okay guys, 18, 19.  This too, this too. So I got 17, you got 19. What else did I get? Did I buy anything else? Did you count the bag? The bag, we didn't buy the thing back. Even if I- I won by two. Great, sure. I won. It's 17, 19. And who said Tima Riot was going to come back and today- Did we really not buy anything else? Look at all of this stuff that I bought. I said I was going to dominate me. You guys- No, that is not fair. It is fair. I am not fair in square as you can see. You know, you should have bought it more. You had an advantage at Target. You had a lot of orange items. I told you we were going to Alta, but you know Alta has really clean stuff. But I bought stuff. I bought three things at Alta. Sorry. Four. Four things at Alta. This 18. Oh, wait, so you won by one. I won by one point. That is so, okay guys, this is insane. Mariah only won by one, but she still won. I was so planning on eating my orange chicken in victory mode. Well, you know what? I need to drink my shake in victory mode because you want to know you can't get none of it. Wait, no, actually give me some. Come on. Give the losers some a little bit. A little bit. I think I won the last challenge, right? Absolutely not. Hey, I think I won the last challenge. So it's all right, mob squad. Did you get it right? Did you guess who won? I honestly thought I took the title, but babe, I'm going to have to give this one to you.  Damn, I should have bought more. Let me hear it louder. Let me just tell you next time, I am going to be buying so much stuff. Let me hear it louder. You're the winner. A-T, Mariah. Guys, I hope you enjoyed this video. Thank you so much for watching.  Actually, we're giving it to 10 lucky winners. 10 people right now. We're following Renaissance Juvenile.   I'm going to give a shout out to 10 people. So we got Toody Lou. Toody Lou. M, Brighi, 92. All right, M. JD underscore Della underscore 8118. Okay. We got Peterson. Ezra. Peterson, shout out to you. Jasmine Gibson, 55. Jasmine. Irene and Nafer, 13. Jennifer, Zepahoe, 12. Zepahoe, Jennifer, Zepahoe. Marie signs, shout out to you. Yanny Lorenz. Yanny Lorenz. That's underscore Rex family. That's shout out to you and? Our Jose underscore Jose. Her name's Rolanda Jose. Rolanda Jose, shout out to you and it's Emily. Guys, thank you so much for following them on Instagram and being subscribed to our YouTube channel. I really hope you enjoyed the video. I'm sorry I let you down, but let me just tell you. I do think I got a lot more healthy stuff because she got a lot of candies, so. But look, this is actually only got three grams of sugar. I guess a lot of the fitness people eat this. Oh, 42, wait. 42 carbs plus. Joke on the drink. Ah! You cheater? Come on, that's so good. So 29 grams of carbs. That's not bad for candy. There's zero sugars. Hey, we're going to be full for a while. If any of you want to come over and help us snack on this, just let us know and we will love to let you in. Thank you guys so much for watching this video. We will see you in the next video, but until then, peace, love you guys.


With the construction of the new Gene Dillon Elementary School progressing, the need for city utilities has grown. That is why the Midget City Council voted tonight to annex the new school's 160 acres. Council members voted 6-1 to annex the school's property from Grant Valley Township. Originally, the city was going to annex the neighboring properties along the north side of County Road 7 to prevent a flag lot. But instead, the council chose to only annex the right-of-way along that stretch of roadway. The statement spoke out against not annexing the other properties. We are now doing a peace communication and I just think that this is just creating issues that are coming about because of another governmental unit that made decisions. And I'm therefore not going to support this resolution because I think that we're just creating a problem. With the new school's property being annexed, the city's city staff has negotiated and prepared the agreement with the Grant Valley Board. The Township will meet to finalize the matter on Thursday, March 8th at 7 p.m. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS. Lakeland PBS. Lakeland PBS. Lakeland PBS. Lakeland PBS.


Hello, and welcome to a screencast where we're going to do some translation from logical statements into English. These all involve a propositional function that has two variables and we're quantifying it and just wanting to know how do we get a sensible English statement out of these logical symbols. So, and this is actually taken from exercise 38 in section 1.3 of the book Discrete Mathematics and its applications by Kenneth Rosen that we use for Math 225. So here in these five statements here SXY is a propositional function that has to do with systems like computer systems and states that those systems may be in. SXY means that X is in state Y. And so, S has a built in English translation to it. We just need to put it together with logical symbols and make some sense out of it. So let's begin with looking at the first statement here. The first statement would say this part is simple enough. It would be saying there exists something. Okay, there exists an X. I changed my pen to blue. There exists an X such that S of X open is a true statement. So let's go down and see if we can make sense of this. There exists an X such that system X is open. And that would be a pretty good English translation. We could just say there exists a system that is open. That would be one way to say that. So simple as that. Just simply translating piece by piece. Now with that let's move on to the second one. This is a universal quantifier. So there for all systems X. I'm looking in here and seeing the disjunction here. So for all systems X, SX malfunctioning is true or, remember that's what this means, or SX diagnostic is true. So one way we can translate the for all X is just merely to say every. That's one acceptable translation of for all. So we could say, one way to phrase this is to say that every system is, we can throw in the word either to make it make a little bit more English sense is either malfunctioning or in a diagnostic state. So every system is either malfunctioning or diagnostic. Now the third here, there's another disjunction but it's between two quantified statements. So it's this or this. So let's do each one of those individually. The first statement is exactly what we did in number one. So they would say there exists a system that is open. And then the second one is similar. There exists a system that is diagnostic. And now the way we could translate that is just to simply take those two statements and join them with an or. So we could say that one acceptable way to translate their exists is sum. So we could say some systems are open comma or some systems are diagnostic. We should emphasize that we don't have to know anything about systems diagnostic or anything relating to the terms themselves in these statements. We're just merely going from one logical form to a language form. Fourth one here would say there exists an x such that not s is available x is available. Now it's kind of an awkward way to say it. So one way we could rephrase that is to say that there exists a system. Instead of saying not is available, we could just say that is unavailable. There exists a system that is unavailable. That's what not x available means. And finally this one here is pretty similar. This is a for all. So for all x not sx working. That means that for all systems x, x is not working. And so we could say that or we could say none of these systems are working. Notice that there are multiple ways to phrase these, but they all capture the same logical essence here going by the quantifier and what the meaning of the propositional function and whatever other logical symbols may be involved. Thanks for watching.


My talk is a bit wide-ranging, and if I have to take a call, don't worry, I'm just kidding. I am tasked with talking you about how the regime seeks to control our schools, our families, and even our speech by denouncing everything it dislikes as hate. But first, I want to talk about just what is the regime? What do we mean by that? And although I'm the last speaker today, I'd like to define what I mean by regime. Just is what is this regime and what does it consist of? The regime, of course, includes the government. The government, as I show, is exerting its power to control expression and information, pedal official narratives, as we've just heard, dictate to schools and control and alter the substance of families themselves. Not only are they dissatisfied with controlling what goes on inside of the family, they want to change the constitution of it in terms of gender. It seeks to define and delimit our rights by suggesting that they have been accorded to us by the government in the first place. For example, when asked by a reporter whether she was upholding her oath to the constitution upon issuing a health order suspending the right to bear arms in Albuquerque and the surrounding county, Michelle Grisham, the governor of New Mexico, stated that no constitutional right, in my view, including my oath, is absolute. And she went on when a federal judge struck down part of her executive order, she issued another one banning the use of guns in parks and playgrounds. This is merely a trifling example of the most glaring cases of the kind of despotism that the state has attempted to irrigate to itself. I'll talk more about others later. By the way, I wanted to note that I'll be dropping a white peel at the end of this talk, so this will be an end to the bad news. But the regime, let's be serious, includes more than the government itself. And it also consists of state apparatuses that are not strictly part of the government per se, including corporate entities that have been drawn into the state's ambit as state enablers and that effectively carry out state functions. I've called these corporate state apparatuses by the term governmentalities. Governmentalities are especially conspicuous today in the cases of big tech and big pharma. The former served to censor, disseminate propaganda, and control information, Google, for example, while the latter is granted an exemption from liability and legal monopoly over medicines and vaccines in exchange for the extension and intensification of state coercion. So examples of big tech censorship and propaganda in collusion with the government are legion. And I've also written about how Google actually controls information to the point of disappearing people and news and so forth. So I have to beg a little bit the different with Karen. It's very hard to get information thanks to these Goliaths who were funded by Incutel in the first place, the CIA's funding agency. But we have seen big tech propaganda in collusion with the government of late. Of course, the Twitter files and Missouri versus Biden provide the most recent illustrations. As I wrote in Google archipelago, big tech is an array of digital technologies that are adopted and used by the state to enhance state power. My argument has since been validated by these two issues, the Twitter files and the Missouri versus Biden. And we saw with the Twitter files, in that case, there's a direct pipeline between several government agencies, the DHS, the FBI, the NSA, CDC, et cetera, and the White House, and social media companies to control information, suppress COVID conspiracy theories, and curate the political sphere by suppressing news and information about the political criminality of the Biden family. This collusion was corroborated, of course, by Missouri versus Biden and interestingly, Representative Stacey Plaskett went so far as to threaten Matt Tehibi, the journalist, with jail time for his testimony before a congressional committee regarding the Twitter files at the same time as the IRS ransacked Tehibi's home in New Jersey while he was giving testimony. Such is the ruthless and devious character of this regime. Of course, the mainstream media is also a governmentality. Along with social media, the mainstream media disseminates official narratives and propaganda and berries or discredits conflicting information. The media is the priesthood of the administrative regime because it defines and enforces the public orthodoxy with which the state identifies itself. I thought we've heard recently where Tucker Carlson said, listen, I know a lot of reporters are basically being told what to say by the CIA. Social media is also central to this priesthood which explains why Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter rebranded as X apparently poses a threat and why Musk, no matter what else we might say about him, has been dogged by the regime ever since buying Twitter. And naturally, organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center are also governmentalities, as Musk has learned. Of course, as we've heard, the military industrial complex, including the military contractors, is a governmentality and the so-called proxy war in Ukraine is the latest example of the state and its governmentalities in action. The military industrial complex extracts wealth from the productive class to expand the state's reach, but also to intimidate, suppress, and surveil the domestic population. Now this regime also includes state actors who, although not necessarily employees of the government or corporations per se, serve as its foot soldiers. These include the standard issue academics who disseminate statist ideology. Academia is one of the main ideological state apparatuses to quote the Marxist Louis Althusser. Academics function to rationalize state power, to making it appear natural and inevitable, writes Marie Rothbard, promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the intellectuals. The minions of this class furnish the state with its intellectual bodyguards to quote Hans Hermann Hoppe. These are state agents, whom, like Noam Chomsky, posture as radicals. Unsurprisingly, many of these radical academics are socialist. Why? The state encourages the proliferation of socialism because the state, because socialism is statist. So academics undertake ideological enforcement on the ground. For example, a Wayne State University English professor won Steven Chiviro, otherwise a nobody, made a rather strange Facebook post stating that it would be better to kill bigots rather than to shout them down. The professor who has taught courses in film wrote, so here's what I think about free speech on campus. Although I do not advocate violating federal and state criminal codes, I think it is far more admirable to kill a racist homophobic or transphobic speaker than it is to shout them down. He did not lose his job. In other words, according to Chiviro, some speech merits their speaker's a death sentence. That is, killing a human being is deemed morally preferable to allowing speech that one does not condone. We should not imagine that Chiviro's view represents an exception, however. It is now common among the establishment. For example, Arizona governor Katie Hobbs, press secretary, recently resigned after advocating shooting transphobes in a tweet on the heels of the transgender shooting killing six people here in Nashville. Chiviro implied that a speaker's audience is qualified and authorized to determine whether a speaker is racist, homophobic, or transphobic, and thus deserve the death penalty. It must be noted that such viewpoints as Chiviro's follow directly from a long lineage of status-leftist theory, so-called. Namely, Herbert Marcusa's 1965 essay, Repressive Tolerance. It has become the blueprint for the leftists who now rule the state. In Repressive Tolerance, Marcusa argued for the intolerance that status and leftists currently demonstrate against expression of which they disapprove. That is all expression other than their own. Marcusa argued that tolerance for expression was originally born in opposition to existing powers, but this was well before leftists gained full power. Real tolerance should not be impartial, says Marcusa. It should favor only the then oppositional, i.e. leftist, expression. Tolerance, as it was practiced according to Marcusa, was of two kinds, one the passive toleration of established attitudes and two the act of official tolerance granted to the right as well as to the left, two movements of aggression as well as two movements of peace to the party of hate as opposed to that of humanity. I call this non-partisan tolerance abstract or pure in as much as it refrains from taking sides, but in doing so it actually protects the already established machinery of discrimination, he said. Now, let's just take apart this passage. That is, expression from the right supports aggression, hate, and the machinery of discrimination, while that of the left supports peace and humanity. This claim should surely strike us as ironic in 2023, just as it should have struck readers as ironic in 1965, but Marcusa saw pure or abstract tolerance as ridiculous. It would follow then that Marcusa would think that only leftist speech should be tolerated, and that is exactly what he argued. How did he justify this? Citing John Stuart Mill, the beginning of the slide into the sloth, Marcus argued that tolerance was only ever supposed to be a means for promoting freedom and truth, thus improving the lot of mankind. And what kind of politics did Marcus see as improving the lot of mankind? Well, leftist politics, of course. And how could Marcusa make this claim after the horrific repression and slaughter in the Soviet Union had already come to light? Is reasoning necessitated exempting the left from the political crimes of leftism and power, of course. Instead, Marcusa focused his criticism on the West, and in particular the U.S. After all, it was the social order of the United States that Marcusa and his fellow travelers were intent on subverting. Why else, when they escaped Nazi Germany, would the Frankfurt School theorists have emigrated to the United States rather than to the obvious place, the Soviet Union. That is, unless they sought to enjoy the relative freedom and wealth of the U.S., well, mercilessly working to tear it to shreds. So, Marcusa argues that real tolerance must begin with stopping the words and images which feed this consciousness, this consciousness that supports the repressive status quo. In other words, to have a liberating tolerance, as he called it, rather than a repressive tolerance, repression of the right is essential. And then Marcusa openly admitted to be sure this is censorship, even pre-censorship, but openly directed against the more or less hidden censorship that permeates the free media. And who should be the arbiters of this expression? Well, people like Marcusa or Shaviro, of course. There you have it. Suppression and censorship of the right are not only allowable, but absolutely necessary because the expression and deeds of the right cannot be tolerated if we are to have real tolerance. If that accounts for the regime's belief that it has the right, nay, the very obligation to shut down expression and action deemed regressive or of the right, the following accounts for its justification for using violence to do so. But I believe there is a natural right of resistance for oppressed and overpowered minorities to use extra-legal means if the legal ones have proved to be inadequate. So there's your justification for violating the non-aggression principle in response to speech. Enter Stephen Shaviro and his ilk. They now hold near total power in the United States. But did it ever occur to such leftist as Marcusa that repression comes from the state and its governmentalities and thus vesting power in the left was a formula for totalitarianism? I suggest that it did and that's exactly what Marcusa wanted. Leftism is endemically totalitarian. And now I'm going to shift to talk about the political orientation of the regime and I'm going to speak about globalism. And I want to just clarify what globalism is as I see it. Globalism is the simultaneous expansion of power and the state and the state's power at the same time as the erosion of the home front of the nation itself of its sovereignty and so forth.  So the top-down orientation of the current regime is globalism and it makes no practical difference whether the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, or any other globalist organization are behind this program, although they are. It has been fully embraced by the state and its corporate governmentalities. Globalism does have as its aim the de facto, if not legal, dissolution of the sovereignty of the nation. It aims at eradicating borders, nullifying the Constitution and abrogating the rights of its citizens. It means to control the consumption, reduce the living standards of its subjects while also reducing their population, I'm afraid. Globalism involves technocracy with an expert class wielding technological tools for surveillance, behavioral modification, and repression. Now the globalist state seizes on various crises to accomplish these objectives, including pandemics, climate change, and war. At home and abroad, it thrives on anarcho-tyranny, cultural and political disorientation, the devaluing of the currency, and of economic sanctions as well. It uses also something called stakeholder capitalism and its environmental, social, and governance index as weapons. Now ESG is an extra or paragovernmental instrument of coercion that is increasingly backed by the government. What is wrong with it? It infringes on property rights, it distorts markets, it coerces producers into accepting its precepts, it thereby establishes a woke cartel of approved producers while eliminating the non-compliant from the market and even civil life, all the while eroding the industrial, energy, and agricultural bases of the Western world. Now you've heard of this term and I'm trying to try to explain what the hell is going on with this, and this is wokeness. The quasi-official dogma of the status globalist regime is a leftist totalitarian ideology called wokeness. Wokeness functions to censor speech, suppress dissidents, and pit supposedly beleaguered identity groups against the majority. It denies property rights by forcing organizations to hire and promote people on the basis of identity and by treating ownership as a privilege that can be revoked. It aims at banning the freedom of association and eviscerating the remnants of the natural social order. Wokeness and anti-white racism are central to the administrative globalist state and its weaponized justice department and surveillance agencies who use them to attack the middle class majority whom they see as their primary adversaries as those most inimical to their rule. They therefore by the allegiance of special identity groups and weaponize them against the regime's alleged foes. This explains the Biden administration's insistence that white nationalism represents the number one domestic threat to the nation when white nationalists comprise a miniscule fraction of the population. And meanwhile corporate capitalists, why do they embrace wokeness? Well, they carry the favor with the government and embrace the state religion because they understand who is wielding power and who can strip them of their wealth. They also recognize the power of the woke cartel as I call it which combines companies and some activists who threaten to cancel them if they fail to co-cowtow to woke demands by sufficiently censoring speech by adhering to official narratives or meeting ESG criteria including the promotion of transgender ideology. Thus cloaked under a thin scrim of anti-racist progressive and environmentalist rhetoric, wokeness is a status and centralized, but it also emanates from these extra governmental organizations and corporations, these governmentalities. It is which they impose extra governmental sanctions both on businesses and individuals over and above those decreed by the state. Globalism represents a further growth phase of this woke corporate state hegemon. Woken periodism which you're seeing in full play in connection with Russia solves to work to dissolve any national or local community and to intensify the globalist states control and extension over more and more of the world. Now I want to start throwing down some hope. Now this is a very nation but nevertheless very striking sign of possibilities. There's an emergent political force albeit still nascent taking shape. This movement is opposed to globalism actually. It may be called localism. This movement seeks to resist the desiderata of the federal state globalists and to nullify their encroachments on self-determination. It envisions and builds parallel structures under local control. It localizes the control of the police, the sheriff, the school system, property protection, self-defense, the economy, and even privatized competitive banking with private currencies. Bitcoin is of course a key financial tool in its arsenal. Localizing and decentralizing these functions and functionaries means to resist the impositions of the federal government including the federal reserve and its statist globalist aspirations. Localist and decentralized movements are already underway in various states and localities including in Idaho, Washington state, New Hampshire and elsewhere. In the U.S. we have a legal basis for localism in the 10th amendment of the Constitution which states that quote the federal government is only authorized to exercise those powers delegated to it and quote to the people of the several states retain the authority to exercise any power that is not delegated to the federal government as long as the Constitution doesn't expressly prohibit it end quote. I think this principle can be taken to the local and individual level. So localism's watchword is decentralization. Unlike globalism this movement is straightforward and honest about its objectives. Globalism on the other hand acts through deception. After all it doesn't go around announcing itself that here we come we're globalism. It has to be detected through its effects. For reasons that I'll discuss shortly localism is the only means I believe of circumventing this centralized government in the hands of the federal global state. It is the only antidote to global tyranny. Now admittedly of these two orientations centralized globalism is obviously more powerful emanating as it does from the government and extra governmental ruling class. Speaking of the ruling class contrary to conscious and unconscious Marxists the ruling class is the state and its beneficiaries not the capitalist class. The state is the only entity that extorts wealth from the productive class through coercion and without an agreement. The state is the real conductor and beneficiary of any exploitation and the ambition of the ruling status is to globalize leaving no escape from their clutches. Somebody once told me wouldn't one government be better because then we would be able to take it over one government would one government of all the world be better than like a thousand Lichtenstein's or something like that. No obviously it gives you nowhere to go and no escape that's the definition of global totalitarianism. So of course under globalism the regime does not operate strictly to serve natural national interests as I've said or to put it another way the national interests as defined by the regime no longer involve the wheel of the nation if they ever did. Instead the ruling class is interested in dissolving this nation into a global hegemon. This global power may be run from the United States but the ruling class is not interested in maintaining the integrity of the nation per se. Instead it aims at making the nation part of a global order with the citizens of the United States having no particular claim to exclusive citizenship or the rights and privileges that it entails. This accounts for the unfettered immigration that the state encourages with open borders and social welfare much like its corporate partners the regime has become globalist it is a great reset state and the nation is now an impediment to its monopolization of power. Now while the regime has so much power of coercion at its disposal localism's power lies in the capacity of the productive class to resist by refusing to participate by withdrawing its consent and precluding its own exploitation although status globalists have vastly more resources at their disposal their power that is the localists nevertheless depends on the I'm sorry their power that is the globalist depends on the consent and participation of the exploited. The main resource of localists is an inexhaustible reserve of independence but to succeed more and more of the exploited and this is our job need to develop a new class consciousness that is one that understands the state which includes its governmentalities as their real exploiter and oppressor. Likewise of course academia has been commandeered as a bulwark against this possibility likewise as Rothbard argued a cadre of libertarian intellectuals must counter the academic intellectual class and quote libertarian education of the public must include an expose of this exploitation and of the economic interests and intellectual apologists who benefit from state rule. This I believe is one of the primary functions of the Mises Institute as I see it. Now let's talk a little bit about a bottom-up revolution if we will and here I'm largely going to be citing Hans Hermann Hoppe. As Hans Hermann Hoppe argues under a democratic system top-down reform of the state is virtually impossible. The holders of power over public goods have no compulsion to abdicate their positions as exploiters especially given the democratic participation of the exploited and unlike kings leaders in democratic states wield an expanding property base that is not their own. Likewise they have a shorter time preference than kings which means that they use state resources more and more profusely. Before democracy writes Hoppe it would have been necessary only to force a king to declare that from now on every citizen would be free to choose his own protector and pledge allegiance to any government that he wanted upon the arrival of democracy the terms have changed. He says that under democratic rule the abolition of a government monopoly of justice and protection requires that either a majority of the public and of their elected representatives would have to declare the government's protection monopoly and accordingly all compulsory taxes abolished or even more restrictive that literally no one would vote and the voter turnout would be zero. Only in this case could the democratic protection monopoly be said to be effectively abolished but this would essentially mean that it was impossible to ever rid ourselves of an economic and moral perversion because nowadays it is given it is a given that everyone including the mob participates in politics and it is inconceivable that the mob should ever in its a majority or even in its entirety renounce or abstain from exercising its right to vote which is nothing else than exercising the opportunity to loot the property of others very he has a very good view of democracy right this leaves um decentralized revolution as the only option the premise is that while people cannot control what the status globalist regime puppeteers attempt to impose on them then likely they are unable they will be unable to convince the majority to abstain from paying taxes or voting they can nevertheless cut the puppet strings from themselves this is also the premise of the grand refusal the nine-point plan to stop the great reset as detailed in my book on sale the great reset in the struggle for liberty this means establishing and extending freedom zones where the dictates of the global regime can be resisted now i just want to make a note that unlike globalism now uh localism is anti-totalitarian because it's not going to dictate to all the various localities what they do and instead it will allow the various regions to act as they will with response to these global state dictates whether they accept them or reject them is entirely their prerogative within of course moral certain moral constraints we don't uh believe that they they would uh or should be advocating things that are expressly uh opposed to non-aggression principle but instead of some sort of overarching totalitarian imposition it is down to the localities as opposed to the central government to put its own uh its own policies and practices in play as far down the scale as possible and now of course you're already thinking these the obstacles of the this is or are manifold there but i would argue they're not insurmountable in fact it has a better chance of success than any attempt to permanently rest the reins of the federal government from the grips of the totalitarians who control it it does not rely on a majoritarian system that is likely rigged against them or in the totalitarians favor and it does not depend on convincing the majority of their own servitude instead it depends on the self-determination of properly class-conscious individuals and communities and their capacity to withdraw and flourish independently the only possibility for resisting and refusing the regime is from the ground up it must begin with dissociation from the federal global state under a spirit of volunteerism only after filtering interests into autonomous or semi-autonomous freedom zones that protect property and individual rights can the project of the nation be reinvigorated then and only then might we build a republic on a firm foundation only from a position of local freedom can the national project be reconfigured now i would argue also that localism is a distinctly american project it is a movement for independence from tyranny and it draws from the same spirit that inspired their first american revolution thank you i'll take some questions well i mean localism can be populist if it wishes so it's not necessarily a contrast thing if particular localities or different regions could be very populist in their orientation not that it would matter that much because they're not going to be worried about national elections and things like that for example if you go to court of lane idaho you don't hear a lot of talk about national politics and they don't care what they're trying to do is build a autonomous place that resists these impositions and that rest power from the federal government and invest it in themselves yes can you hear me one problem with localism that i've run into because i'm trying to be a local activist is that there are a lot of federal handouts a lot of federal grants and can you address some of the ways we can convince local officials not to be tied to these bloody strings of power because i mean you just have to know that every handout is actually a rope to hang yourself with that they just have to be made it has to be made clear look everything you accept from the state like this the federal government comes with a price and that price is your freedom it's that simple i mean you just have to make that clear now some you know this is not easy this is a pioneering thing right this is going to be difficult it's i'm not giving you and this is a white pill but it's not a silver bullet okay there's a difference so it takes work it takes it takes struggle and it will not be easy but it has to be done i was i was wondering if as far as political strategy and localism goes what you think the path forward for the sympathetic parties the libertarian party and the republican party at a local level how should they go about achieving i was thinking about that this morning i was thinking something like this amish people only with guns frankly uh i won't say anything else like about the widening of the gene pool but you know amish people with guns basically directly to that point the amish people with guns do you feel at all like you're abandoning uh society abandoning urban life sort of you're seeding that ground right like you know you believe in libertarianism we all believe in libertarianism um do we win by shrinking and shrinking and sort of just running away from everyone and letting them just just control everything except we're in our little corner that's a great question i mean it's a fair question it's an obvious thing that we should think about is doing this running away i would say i would quibble with the characterization i don't think it's running away to struggle to build an independence structure that's parallel to and that will have an impact on the state if it's successful that will that will weaken the foundation of the federal global global glob uh that it is you know so i if this became something that would catch on that more and more people would do then all of a sudden you start to see the implosion of the federal government and that's what we need to see we're not gonna blow it up it's not gonna happen it's not gonna work we have it has to implode pardon yes market forces by withdrawing consent and preempting our own exploitation by taxes okay on the one hand you're like appealing to the hacker and me on the other hand i have to be measured here and i don't want to i i would say though no i don't believe in sort of like what we might call cyber terrorism or something like that uh only because it'll backfire and the repression will increase even lenin said that by the way uh he didn't believe in the anarchist approach to taking down capitalism because it would uh you couldn't win by gunpowder if it were a matter of gunpower then you know it would already be over by virtue of who owns the most but it's not that it's about it's about people power so i don't think that we want to do like that kind of thing now of course the non-aggression principle says when i am attacked and when i am uh when i'm violated then i have a right of retaliation hey dr rackenwald um have you heard of free cities foundation yes they're the cities called prospera and honduras um do you think that's a pretty good strategy do you think they're flaws in doing that sort of thing or what do you think of that we have to be very careful with some of these projects because actually some of them are being found funded by the world economic forum so i would have to look into just what's behind it there's all these projects and they're saying you know we'll be in sustainable and they don't say 15 minute cities but the 15 minute cities is a project from the globalist world economic forum that we don't want to any part of because that's in the imposition of these so-called uh sustainability criteria on the population so uh i don't know i'd have to look into that specific ones uh to make sure i don't want to make and speak out of school uh thanks for your talk dr rackenwald i i was wondering about another vector of attack other than localism or uh cyber terrorism um which is the tort system um you know you were talking about corporate wokeness and something that you didn't touch on is the extent to which corporate wokeness is an artifact of the civil rights law and particularly things like punitive damages for equal employment uh opportunity suits so that seems to be changing like there's maybe another little white pill in recent developments at the supreme court and at lower levels yeah um so what do you think about the idea of you know shareholder suits uh for esg stuff and then yeah you know anti-white racism suits maybe the kind of stuff steven miller's doing that kind of absolutely yeah this is not like this is not like an either or thing where this is to the exclusion of everything else i i even outlined in my book uh to you know that for example esg is a monopoly scheme right so it needs to be fought uh directly in that sense and so using the courts to fight uh sort of to sue now not to not to have the the doj suing right but for individuals and companies to sue uh various companies and organizations and the state itself for its practice policies and practices indeed so this is not to the exclusion of everything and i don't say abandon the the the you know abandon the project of fighting against centralization and all of its various manifestations but doing it from this foundation uh of this local movement localism movement here's the last question okay i i also think localism is probably the best way forward as well uh my fear is that if there isn't enough momentum uh they will isolate and you know come up with some sort of they'll kill us yeah reason they'll pull away go they'll pull away go right yeah how do we fight against that yeah i mean i think you know we have to be strategic and how strategic and tactical on how we form the communities they have to be large enough and conspicuous enough to not be like a house like in Idaho where they can go and kill the mother while she's holding a baby and nobody i mean people know about it and it's horrible uh we're like we go and we got we can't do it such that we're isolated to that point so it has to be tactically and strategically thought out and done from a very uh we need to make sure we're building enough of a community before declaring ourselves you know what we are does that make sense is it adequate i yeah so thank you very much


So welcome everyone to the panel, image credits in Wikipedia, can they do better? I'm going to shortly introduce the four speakers who are going to take part in the panel, and then every speaker would introduce a bit more if they want about themselves. So we are going to talk with Isaac, who started the whole conversation on Facebook, thanks to which we will have this session, Asaf Bartol, a long-time Wikipedia, Dominic, who is going to talk about his work also related to this issue problem with image crediting. And I am Ukrainian Wikipedia and also an illustrator of the Ukrainian Wikipedia, and I also share the concerns and things. The outline of the panel is we are going to present slides, we are going to talk about issues that we see, problems, and also possible solutions, and talk about a pilot project that can be started as a result of this talk. And also we are going to take questions or discussion points if anyone from the audience would like to add something. That I'm going to give floor to Isaac. Thank you very much Nats, and good morning from Nigeria. So thank you again for providing additional context on the fact that this whole discussion actually started from a Wikipedia, weekly Facebook page. And I'm really very excited to join this conversation today. Let me start by saying that most users of images from Wikipedia believe it is safe, and they do not have to worry about any risk of criminal liability or legal jeopardy. But in the rich sense, images on Wikipedia are really free and safe for users. Yes, it is free and safe, provided the user can comply with the licensing conditions of the image. But imagine a scenario in which an academic or a company, for instance, reuse an image from Wikipedia and credit seems to Wikipedia because they found the image on Wikipedia. And a week later receive a letter from a lawyer that they have infringed on the copyright of the image they use from Wikipedia. The academic or company was told the image belongs to a Nigerian photographer called IOCOMI OAMI, and has the academic or company to pay damages and legal fee. So this is the kind of risk we are proud to subject users of images in Wikipedia as to. So let's look at our current practice. In the current practice on how we provide the informations for users. So our current practice provide the licensing information on external website, mostly with media commons, with insertions of a clickable links to the original file that contains all the relevant information. The current practice also assume that re-users will click on the invisible links to find the image license. The question is, is our current practice really effortful enough for our re-users? Do they have sufficient information, or is this current practice sufficient enough for our users to satisfy the licensing requirement of images they use on Wikipedia? This is Alfego from production, one second. So we just provide that link and tell them to click on it. We don't provide information that they must click on links to find those information. So we just put that invisible link there. But that comes with its own problems. So we need to look at the common problems that are associated with the current practice. One of them is misattributions by re-users, or no attributions at all. Because most of the time when these re-users use this content from Wikipedia, they just credit it to Wikipedia. A team? Isaac, can you hear us? Sometimes they don't even provide attribution. Can't hear. Isaac, can you please? And by extension, these put re-users at risk of criminal liability. All right, I put him into the waiting room. And we are actually starting now. Can you ask Mikael to comment? Sorry, there was a discrepancy here. We are getting started now to have you join. So we start from the beginning? Yes, and then I'll add one second. I'll let you know when. Apologies. Hello, can you hear me? It looks like the system locked me out. One second. Isaac, we are still not ready. Can you hear us? Because you were not able to hear before. Isaac? So I don't know. I'm not sure if I can continue if you can hear me. Yes, we can hear you. Can you hear us? Because you were unable to hear before. Okay. Thank you very much. How was the shot? Yes, we need. Can you hear us? Can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you. We need to start. Yes, we need to start from the beginning. Sorry. Wow. We tried to call you, but you didn't hear us for some reason. Okay. So good to go. Yes, thank you. So it feels a bit like a dead end. Thank you very much. I'll start again. And I'll tell you when you can again. Okay. Sorry, everyone in the room. Sorry. You'll have to do the beginning from the beginning again. So welcome everyone to the session. Image credits in Wikipedia. Can we do better? We want to talk a bit about our own practices of attributing, not attributing, mentioning using media images in Wikipedia articles. And this panel going to have four speakers. That's Isaac, Asav Bardov, and Dominic and myself. We all come from different Wikipedia's, different projects, and we also have different backgrounds. But this panel, the topic of this panel is relevant for all of us. It all of the idea of this talk started with the post by Isaac in Facebook and Wikipedia weekly. And we are going to talk about our practices and about problems and possible ways to resolve them. There are also ways to join a pilot project if anyone from the audience is interested in. And also we are going to have a session with Q&A. You can also definitely post your questions in the chat. But we are going to take them along the way if you see them and they fit, or maybe later when we have the Q&A session. So with that, I'm going to give the floor to Isaac. Thank you very much, Nats. I'm happy to be here. And thanks for providing the additional context that this conversation started on Wikipedia weekly on Facebook. So I would like to say that most re-users of images from Wikipedia strongly believe it's safe and they do not have to worry about any risk of criminal liability or geo-party for using any of those contents from Wikipedia. But images from Wikipedia are actually free and safe for re-users. The answer is yes. It is free and safe, provided the re-users can comply with the licensing conditions of the image. And one of the most important and key requirements is that the copyright order, which is the photographer, in the case of a photograph, must be credited. But imagine a scenario in which a business company or an academic institution re-use an image from Wikipedia and credit the image to Wikipedia simply because they found the image on Wikipedia. And a few days later, receive a letter from a lawyer that they have infringed on the copyright of the image they re-used from Wikipedia. And the lawyer claiming the image belongs to one Isaac Alatunde from Nigeria, a Nigerian photographer and not Wikipedia and demands, you know, the academic institutions or the company to pay for damages and the leg of it. So this is probably a classic example of risk we are putting or subjecting the re-users of images from Wikipedia that they don't get to report, reported on the media does not mean they don't Apple. Some of these things Apple's almost all the time. But is our current practice, is our current practice, you know, really helpful enough for our re-users to satisfy this legal requirement? Let's review our current practice. Let's, you know, put it like this. Our current practice actually provide licensing information on the external website, usually with media commons and insert almost invisible clickable links to the original files containing all relevant information. This same practice as Zoom that re-users will click on the invisible link to find the image license and every other information pertaining to that image. The question is, is this current practice sufficient enough? Is it effort enough? Is it enough to guide re-users on how to reuse content from Wikipedia? It is not entirely bad to present it this way. But it also comes with its own problems. So let's look at some of the problems that are associated with this sort of guide guides. So one of the common problems is mis-attributions by re-users or no attributions at all. So mis-attribution in the sense that many people will reuse content from Wikipedia. We almost, you know, credit that contents to Wikipedia itself or provide no attributions at all because they will definitely not see who the copyright order is right from the page. And by extension, this puts these re-users at risk of criminal liability or legal jeopardy. And this has a serious implications on a project, on its credibility, reliability of, sorry, on its credibility and reliability of information on Wikipedia. But why should we even care about crediting copyright order in Wikipedia? Why should it matter? Why should we spend, you know, volunteer's time trying to provide credit? First of all, it's a legal requirement that we must satisfy. And we must strive as much as possible to satisfy that legal requirement. There is no excuse. That volunteer's time will be wasted is not a valid reason to circumvent that requirement. So why should we care? One, it minimizes or even maybe significantly reduces misattributions, which means if you make the credit line as clear and visible as possible, people will hardly misattribute this to Wikipedia. People will hardly or almost not be able to not provide credit lines. They will, you know, see the copyright order and whatever it is and they will be able to provide appropriate credit. And this way we protect copyright orders works from misuse. And this gives them, you know, confidence in our project and, you know, gives them the impression that we are reliable and we can actually protect their interest and, you know, immediately resort in them adding more content, releasing more content for use. It also protects users from criminal liability or legal body after use. I mean, remember the scenario I painted? I mean, you can imagine if I have to receive a letter from a lawyer that violated the copyright because I misattributed it. Not my fault because I don't have, you know, a sound knowledge of how copyright works and I believe the content of Wikipedia has been released under free license and I get that kind of, you know, letter. It could, you know, change my orientations, my thought, my belief about Wikipedia's reliability and credibility. So all of that encompasses our serious implications on our project. So I'm saying in the next sense that it shows that when we, you know, care about all of this, the picture we paint out there is that Wikipedia can be trusted. It's credible and, you know, can be considered reliable as a good source of information. So how, what should we do better to improve our current practices? How should we go about it? Who are the people that should be involved? And is there any steps that should be taken as an emergency intervention? What do we do with the ones that have been, you know, probably drawn wrongly in the past? So all of this is central to the discussion we have today. So I'm going to hand over to my colleague, Max, to take it away from me. Max, over to you. Thank you. Thank you, Isaac. So I just wanted to remind about the requirement of the license, the most common license that we use now for media, that we must give appropriate credit and one may argue that given this invisible link where we expect people to somehow guess and know that all the information about the author is going to be provided on another website. Or sometimes not, if you're talking about non-media, is, I would argue, not the appropriate credit to the authors. So even if we, even though creative comments explicitly say that our practice is legal, but there are real issues with that that Isaac referred to a bit, we actually do not advertise, we lose a way to advertise real licenses even though the project are going to rely on them. We do not clearly mark non-media guiding people inside the articles. We can just take screenshots and be unaware that the pictures inside the articles have different kind of licenses possible and authors. Also, we, ourselves, do not set a good example given credit that we use and we expect others to do that when we do not give the appropriate credit ourselves. So the English Wikipedia has already discussed this in the past and their argument not to include image credits because they are relevant to this discussion and you can find this link. For example, one of the arguments was there is no need to clutter articles through this information. Credit is already provided for the majority of images in the file description page which includes authorship, licensing and more. And that partially is true but again, we go back with this link being visible and not clear. Whereas we do clutter article with templates explaining to people that this or that text fragment was taken from this or that source. Even if that source is under-free license or even in public domain. And then it begs the question why don't we have something like an information for the reader included in the article as a template that images used in this article are in public domain or published under-free license or non-free media for use. Useful educational purposes and this information you can get from the file description pages if you click on each file themselves in the article. Or maybe we should have them at least in the terms below because other projects are not exclusive and the terms do mention that text is available. There is no mentioning about the images used. So we do not expect people to understand about the text fragments. We do not expect people to just believe that the information is taken under free license or everything. But we do expect people to somehow clip on an invisible link and also believe that we are cluttering the text articles if we just giving citation or mentioning or explanation about the images. So warning in the terms we warranted taking into account that we do that for the text. But also we do mention about the text in the article itself not only in the terms. So it seems a proper citation attribution for every image used also can be warranted. We can easily have an article with 400 footnotes about every Warsaw of text information used and we would have all those sources we would have also general sources but we just want people to understand and read more further reading and we still with all of that are going to have a template about text included being from source under free license or about or in public domain. Because we do not expect people just to guess that and also we are going to have that mentioned in the page in terms used. So we also already know that media helps articles and articles help promote media. What I mean by that is that media files used in the article do help reader to understand the article better illustrations for particular portions of the article needed. The articles Wikipedia are viewed by more people and they are going to be reused more and some media outlets are going to use those pictures in the prominently featured in the articles more if they want to illustrate some points. So one of the other arguments the English Wikipedia in that discussion was maintaining this in article credits would be a significant maintenance burden on other editors. But there are ways to have it automated and let's talk about that and with this I'm going to go to Dominic to give us a bit of a background information practical ways to automate this information being shown in the articles based on his work. Dominic? Great. Thanks so much and thanks for inviting me. You can go to the next slide. First I just want to talk a little bit about how I came to this issue. So over the last two years I've been working with the Digital Public Library of America which is the National Cultural Heritage aggregator in the United States since we launched our program in 2020 we've uploaded about 3 million files to Wikimedia Commons from over 200 individual contributing institutions becoming the largest contributor to Wikimedia Commons. Next slide. You can find our category there on Commons. We're doing this essentially just to provide our member institutions a simple activity that they can easily be trained to perform putting their images into Wikipedia articles for which the outcome can be easily measurable. So this is an example of an image from the Indiana State Library in the United States that was uploaded by DPLA and as in a Wikipedia article. In one case a single institution staff member working to add images to over 100 articles over the course of a few months generated 45 million page views for their institution which is a huge impact. Next slide. In addition to the uploads themselves we actually contribute metadata in the form of structured data on Commons now. So this is just showing what our uploads actually look like in practice. So for every image we add about 10 or more structured data statements to our uploads. And we can do that because we have all the institutions descriptive metadata that's what we're using to do our uploads. So we're uploading statements or we're adding sorry we're adding statements like title creator copyright description all those sorts of things and this also has allowed us to regularly sync and update the metadata for all of our past uploads whenever the institution makes changes to their data. So it's not just a static snapshot of the uploads that as they looked like when we did them. Next slide. So just briefly I just wanted to say that the success of our program at DPLA is really based on these two philosophies first we need to get institutions on board with participating and that means tasks that busy professionals can perform successfully with minimal new skills necessary so if the cost to get involved is too high they won't be interested and part of buy-in is that cultural institutions want to know that we're going to be responsible stewards of their information and that they're not necessarily reflecting the metadata that they invested their own expertise and intellectual labor in as well as actually attributing their institution for the work that they've done and the objects that they hold in their collection that we're uploading and displaying on Wikipedia. The second part here is once we have institutions that are interested in contributing to Wicca media projects we want to make sure that they're actually successful and impactful and that's why we designed the program that we did with where we've solved the problem centrally of doing bulk upload so the institutions don't have to figure that out and it's also built around this idea of a small discrete easily trainable task of adding an image to an article using visual editor and tools on commons like crop tool I can train someone to do a task of adding an image to an article not writing articles on Wikipedia in a few minutes next slide so I'm coming to this with a goal of both improving the integrity of the data in Wikipedia but also improving the usability of our image workflow for editors and I think with some of these with this proposal that we can do both of those things next slide so I want to just talk a little bit about the landscape on English Wikipedia here's I'm not going to be able to go over everything in detail but here's a few links to some existing proposals like Nat mentioned this is in the perennial proposals section in English Wikipedia but just to show what is the actual kind of most relevant policy this is the manual of style on the English Wikipedia which explicitly says not to credit the image author or copyright holder in the article unless relevant whatever that means it's unclear so next slide this contrasts pretty sharply with what especially cultural institutions and academic institutions are used to this is just taken from a book off my bookshelf this is what you would typically find in an academic work where the image itself that's a historical image is considered informational content just like the text and is cited in the text as such next slide so next slide please so I can't go through all of these I just wanted to give a few links or that people can look up oh sorry if you can go back one just to give people a few seconds if they want to look those up but there's a few different sorry can you go back one slide now there's a a few different places we have mock-ups on the wiki this is I might regret this but this is the one article I'm aware of in English Wikipedia that has an image citation in the form of a footnote so if you want to look at it live it's also the top link here that Charles Robinson Rockwood comes along and removes that but if you would like to see a live demo this is already possible in Wikipedia to accomplish this by using the existing REF tag and you can create REF use the group function to group references so as long as you use the citation inside of a caption in an image right now and added a separate group for images there's nothing stopping anyone from technically from doing this so next slide please this is just the screenshot of that so this is just showing an article with an image and there's the footnote there which goes to the references section and there's a separate group within the references section for images next slide please what I want to also show is what we've been working on at DPLA and what's been essentially enabled by the fact that we've added structured data to all of our images and hopefully increasingly possible through more adoption of structured data for all images in Wikimedia Commons this is something that's possible right now only on Commons in Amaka but what I created is this template you can go look at it live this template embed DPLA on Wikimedia Commons but it's coded in such a way that the template has only the file, the name of the file as a parameter all of the data for a caption using citation type information can be generated automatically all of these things that are in the caption in the screenshot here are already in the structured data of the image the title, the creator, the institution it comes from this is just a hypothetical citation format it could be formatted however you like but the idea here is that a user could just by including the image have all the data that they need necessary for a caption or citation just auto-populated in the same way the user expects to be able to do that from when they're adding a citation in the text and just provide an ISBN or something and then all the rest is auto-populated next slide so we have some issues to make that technical part happen first is that that's not actually possible right now to do within English Wikipedia for example because structured data on Commons can't be pulled into other projects right now we're using Lua in the same way that wiki data can be pulled into other projects so what we would expect to see some day is that one structured data on Commons those statements can travel to other wikis then we could build templates like this that allow us to do that right now it's just a mock up on Commons although what we could do is something like that pulls it in in the same way that Cytoid does and it's just static text rather than being dynamically generated from the wikimedia Commons data there would still be some infrastructure built around that the other thing that would be of course the most important part of it is actually support from the Wikipedia community and so that if people started to just start adding these willy-nilly that they wouldn't be getting reverted that's I think part of what I want to have these community discussions about it so that's it for me and also if you're interested in learning a little more about the DPLA projects and what we're working on with structured data on Commons here's some links to our grants and thank you to the Wikipedia Foundation for sending them thank you Dominik, sorry muted so overall what can be done about this we can change how we do it after all it is our own practice so I'm here also going to give you a few mockups it's in Ukrainian but you would be able to see that there is a picture in the first article where we are prominently saying that this picture is a picture by and then the name of the author and also a license or in a gallery it can also look like that and for some pictures it's really important for some articles to include not just like a lot of pictures but pictures that have meaning for the article maybe the outer experience or inner appearance of the object and it's important then not only to have the picture included randomly but have it included because it illustrates some points it can be also done through a list of illustrations which I also showed like the upper one a list of illustrations used in the article it can also be done through references which was mentioned also in the chat and also it can be mentioned with a tiny visible link for photo credits near pictures if you don't want to go into that we can also think about that including photo credits which would link to the original file and I would argue that that might be useful for some people because some of the pictures on comments do not have actually one author somebody can change crop do something and then only the file itself can show you all the contributors to the file so another argument in the same English Wikipedia discussion was that people can spam articles including a lot of images in attempt to use Wikipedia for free advertisement but Wikipedia is not a discriminant collection of information and editors need to include only those images that matter anyway this proposal does not change that and if anything it goes it makes people go an extra mile to prove that this specific media is needed so with that I'm going to pass the floor to Asaf Thank you what I like to add to the previous speakers is to re-emphasize the point that there are at least two separate issues here in our current practice and that is the missing license type and the missing attribution these are at least ostensibly separate issues and they are in principle separately solvable we could for example add the license type the explicit mention of the license type while still sidestepping all the issues related to the usernames for example one argument that has been raised and was not mentioned here today yet was that some people might have offensive usernames the mention of which in article may be distracting or offensive so for example even though the offensive username issue is also in principle solvable we can completely sidestep it and still at least solve the problem of mentioning an individual piece of media's license license type so I'm pointing out that these are in principle separately solvable and like I said the offensive username argument for example is also solvable we could decide to have just a media credits link under each image in other words making the link explicit rather than implicit on the image and still hide the username or we could determine that there is some acceptable username policy and either rename non-compliant usernames or include only acceptable usernames on page and hide unacceptable usernames inside the link I'm just bringing it up as a sketch of an answer to make the point that we could solve this any number of ways I think the goal of this talk in this panel is to convince people who are yet to be convinced that there is a problem and that to encourage people to commit to solving it if we are convinced of this solving it we can go ahead and brainstorm the actual solutions but what I'd like to move the conversation forward to is this as has been mentioned this has been a perennial proposal it has been discussed in the past and we tend to discuss ourselves into exhaustion seeking consensus and that's why this is a perennial proposal but I suggest to you that we could cut through this exhaustion by running a well-designed experiment next slide please and I suggest to you that yes so an experiment could actually help us get the evidence that for example one of the claims is that this missing attribution is causing re-users to not properly attribute images and that would be easier to prove if we actually conduct some experiment and show that providing proper attribution does in fact help re-users attribute so such an experiment can really help determine whether and how much of a problem this is next slide please I suggest to you that an experiment would help us make progress before the end times when we manage to convince absolutely everybody on all Wikipedia's that this change can happen we could design an experiment and I'm not pretending that we have already designed it work needs to be done to create a good valid experiment to test the hypothesis that changing our image crediting practices would be a good change and we could for example identify some limited scope maybe a particular Wiki project on a large Wiki or maybe a small Wiki or maybe just a set of articles on which we experiment we may even have natural experiments in such articles or pages where there's already been this mockup that's a large enough sample or not but the point is we could create a sample and a control group of course and then implement explicit attribution and explicit licensing on those articles and then measure several things we could measure the awareness of the licensing terms among the people reading the articles we could do that with a little invitation at the top of the articles to fill out a form or survey or something and we could also try and measure the reuse of those images in the wild using an image search to try and find out whether those images in the sample group are in fact better attributed than images from the control group again this is just a sketch of an experiment and I think we would benefit from having professional researchers co-design the experiment but my point is an experiment could help us break through the cycle of is it a problem is it not a problem is there a solution to every edge case or not an experiment can help us move forward and I'd like to encourage those of you who agree that this is a problem to join us in thinking about how to move forward with an experiment next slide so if you're interested in thinking about it with us please mention your interest in the talk page of our Wikimania talk and we will get in touch with you and see how you can help with your community with your wiki project wherever you are maybe you can help with mockups maybe you can help with translation and we will try and report about this probably next year maybe next wikimania if we're able to actually run some kind of experiment thank you Asaf so we have actually started later so we don't have a chance now to have a session I've saved the chat and things that you discussed here so we would be able to follow up with you if we can find you if you can put your names in the either pod we would be able to find you even if your real name does not correspond with your username and I also put here useful links that are relatable to this discussion and of course there would be a link to this presentation from our submission and from the either pod and I wanted to say thank you in our full languages for your time and for your interesting ideas and discussion points that you mentioned in the chat thank you and thank you to the speakers and the support team