Welcome to Sheboygan County Government, working for you. My name is Adam Payne, Sheboygan County Administrator and co-host of this program with Chairman Mike Vanderstien. And today we're very pleased to have our Corporation Council with us, Mr. Carl Bison. Carl, welcome. Welcome. Thank you. It's good to have you here. Carl is one of 22 very important department heads working for Sheboygan County with a $130 million budget, 22 departments, about 206 programs, and nearly 1,000 employees. As you can imagine, legal issues come up from time to time. And Carl is certainly in the midst of it in one of our key advisors, so it's good to have you here. Thank you. I appreciate it. Why don't you start by sharing with our viewers a little bit about yourself and when you became Corporation Council for Sheboygan County. Okay. I'm Sheboygan native, graduated from North High School in 1970. And I went to college and law school. After law school, I was in private practice for many years. I continued to be in private practice. My law firm has the contract with Sheboygan County to provide the civil legal services to the county. I've been the designated Corporation Council, the lead person, if you will, from our law firm since the year 2000. And when people hear Corporation Council, some of them might be wondering, well, what is that? You just shed a little light on that being an attorney, but what are the roles and functions of the Corporation Council? The Corporation Council acts as the civil legal council for the county. If you consider county government to be like a corporation or a large business, I would be the attorney that does all the legal advice for the county. Now the county has among its functions law enforcement and prosecution of crime, that's done by the district attorney. But if there's legal advice to be given to department heads, to you as county administrator or the county board, you look to me for that legal advice. And we look to you frequently. What's the name of your firm? What is its structure, and how did this relationship come to be over time with your law firm? I'm a member of the Hop Newman-Humpkey law firm in Sheboygan. We have about 10 members. The lead name in our firm is Hop, as in Alex Hop. Alex Hop, as a young attorney in the early 50s, was an assistant district attorney on a part-time basis, and also part of a law firm. As assistant district attorney, he was delegated the civil responsibilities for the county back then. Later on in the late 1950s, the district attorney's office separated out its functions from the Corporation Council functions, or the civil stuff. Alex continued to do the civil stuff, and the district attorney's office continued to do criminal prosecutions. Historically, our law firm has held the contract up until the present time, when I continue to do it on behalf of the law firm, to serve the county as my biggest client. And that's not necessarily the norm. If you look at the 72 counties across the state, I think most have Corporation Council on staff as part of the county table of organization. Sheboygan County's had a long and successful track record with your firm, with the outside contracted Corporation Council services. As you think about it, based on your experience, or the experience of your predecessors, what's some of the positives of having this contracted relationship? Well, there's a couple of things. First of all, you're right. There's only about a half a dozen counties that still have an outside law firm act as Corporation Council, and we're by far the largest. Where we think that both the county has benefited and the public has benefited is that by having a nine or 10 person law firm handling matters for the county, we can bring levels of expertise to various issues that an in-house Corporation Council might not have. So if I've got an issue dealing with an open records question, I can rely upon myself, but I can also rely upon Mike Bauer or Mary Lynn Donahue from our firm, who also do municipal law. If there's a real estate question, I can refer to one of the real estate lawyers. If there's a probate question, I can refer to Phil Miller, who does probate in the state planning. Regular in-house Corporation Council might not have the wherewithal to respond to those kind of specialized issues that come forward from time to time. And if they don't, then they too would probably have to go outside and seek legal assistance. Right. Carl, as you think about your role and responsibilities there, and you just described the contracted situation being a little unique, some of our viewers might be thinking, well what about accountability? If we're contracting with you, who are you accountable to? How is that built into the relationship? Well in a couple of different ways. First of all, I have a contract which has a term ending of four years. It has to be reviewed over the course of four years, and if I have an unhappy client, I can be non-renewed. Furthermore, you can fire me at any time under the terms of the contract. You might say, gee, you didn't negotiate a very good contract for yourself, Carl, but I think it's in the best interest of the public to have the ability to make quick changes if it's determined to be necessary.  If I don't do the job, you can non-renew me. My contract comes up at the end of December of 2010. If the county decides that it isn't a good working relationship, they can make the change then or even before then if something comes up. On a day-to-day basis, I'm accountable to the Human Resources Committee of the county board. They're my oversight committee, and I have to give periodic reports to that committee as to what my activities are. And of course, as a department head, you interact with all the department heads, and if I'm not providing services to other department heads, you hear about it. If I'm not providing adequate assistance or advice to other county supervisors, you as county board chairperson hear about it, and if that happens, I end up hearing about it too. You did a nice job providing an overview to wrap my segment up before turning it over to Mike. You mentioned all these other department heads that you interact with and have to provide assistance to. Please give our viewers a flavor for the issues, kind of a menu of issues that you routinely work on or your firm works on. Well every day it's a little bit different. I could be dealing with a probate court issue. People are not turning in their annual guardianship reports, so I as corporation counsel have to chase down these people to make sure they turn in their reports. The county has an airport, the airport has hanger leases, I have to draft and redraft and renew and change leases as appropriate. The county has a zoning department, the zoning department does land use things. I spend quite a bit of time giving advice to the zoning department when they have issues. The day to day activities of the county board requires me to be involved in open records issues, open meeting issues, so there's never a shortage of issues that come up. On Friday I spent about an hour and a half giving advice to the clerk of court's office about a writ of eviction which they issued and then after the fact they decided they weren't sure they should have issued it. So I had to do a significant amount of research into the area of rits of execution. I had to consult with the clerk of court's office, I had to consult with the court that did the underlying eviction, I had to consult with the sheriff's department. We decided that the writ was improperly issued. Now I found out that the facts upon which the clerk originally gave me to analyze were incorrect. I have to rethink the whole thing so that's probably another hour and a half today. So there's always an issue and I don't know what it's going to be tomorrow. That's always something different. And it always makes it interesting. Well done. Thank you, Carl. Well going on to something different, Carl, from time to time people have been hearing about unfunded mandates and their negative impacts on governments like our county. From a legal perspective, can you tell us a little bit about what unfunded mandates are and how they affect our county? The term unfunded mandate refers to the fact that county units of government are charged to do certain things. We are required to do so either by the state government or by the federal government. And when the state or the federal government requires us to do something, we have to either get money from them to do it or we have to put it on the backs of the taxpayers. When we're obligated to do something by no choice of our own and the federal or state government doesn't provide us with the resources to do it, it's an unfunded mandate. We have to come up with the money and the ordinary choice would be charging it on the property tax rolls. And that's the frustrating thing, of course, for the elected county supervisors because they're being asked to do things that they have no choice over, but they have to pass the tax burden on to the taxpayers who are wondering how come the taxes keep going up. That's great. Carl, one of the other new factors that we've been having to live with in county government are levy limits. Could you please describe what levy limits are and how those affect the county board? At the same time that certain burdens or responsibilities are being dropped upon the county government by the state, the state has decided that county supervisors are not going to be given the leeway to figure out how to pay for these things and are not given the free rein to raise taxes if that's the only choice they've got. So the legislature has essentially capped the ability of county boards to raise taxes on a local level. And I think what is it now? Three percent. Three percent at them under the current budget. So the county board is trapped in a situation where they may be required to do some service. And that service may cost county government four or five percent of its current budget, but if the county can't afford to do it, they can't raise taxes to match the obligation put on them. And so the result is that something else gets cut. So it's a real struggle that you've got to go through every day on the county board level. And it's a real struggle for all of us in county government to try to make things work under those circumstances. Thanks for that information. Shifting gears a little bit, Carl. I know that your office plays a big role in child support and mental commitments. Could you explain what you do on behalf of the county in those areas? Sure. We have an unusual situation with our contract. A couple of the responsibilities of county government are to provide for services to the most vulnerable in our community, whether it's seniors suffering from the infirmities of aging, mentally handicapped, mentally disturbed persons, those people who need services and under circumstances where those people need services ordered by the courts, it's the job of the corporation council to provide the legal services necessary to get the courts to assign a guardianship or a mental commitment. The corporation council is responsible for those duties. We have in our structure an in-house attorney, attorney Natasha Torrey Morgan, who handles all those mental commitments and guardianship commitments on behalf of the county health and human services department. She's full time, works for the county but reports to me under kind of the interesting relationship we have. At the same time there is a similar arrangement with the child support agency. Again counties have been mandated by the state and federal governments to provide services for establishing paternity, for establishing and enforcing child support obligations and Natasha handles those duties on behalf of the county as well. We've talked a little bit about some of the day-to-day activities that you go through Carl. But are there any special projects that you work on for the county that just don't come up that often? A few, yes. We've been very busy on the county level for the past several years. First and foremost as far as size and an ongoing project, we had the $25 million non-motorized transportation initiative that our county was fortunate enough to receive. However, as you can imagine there's an extraordinary amount of legal work to review contracts to set up the protocols for getting citizen input to make the arrangements to spend that amount of money. We've got initiatives ongoing including the Morgan aircraft venture. They are potentially going to be locating their operations at the Sheboygan County Airport. We are working to have a lease arrangement with them for a long-term lease at the airport that has the potential for an incredible amount of economic good news for this community. We're currently involved in discussions and negotiations for the sale of Sunny Ridge North. That's a surplus piece of property that the county has. Developers have approached the county to make that into a project that can get back on to our tax rules and to provide for employment for those in our community. So there are a variety of issues that are coming up on a special project basis as opposed to day-to-day governmental activities that I'm involved in. If I may interject on the Sunny Ridge North project, because a number of our viewers may not be aware of this. It has been discussed at county board meetings and other committee meetings, but as Carl is well aware, since he did an enormous amount of legal work on that, we sold Sunny Ridge in May of 07, but still retained the north building and grounds. And now we have an opportunity to sell the north building grounds, which will be turned into senior living apartments. The north building will be 42 senior living apartments, some condos to the north of that yet and then some duplexes and back, but then in front some businesses that will be complimentary to the nursing home itself and that type of development. So it's real exciting for us involved with this project because it'll provide some further budget relief to the county board, allowing us to move those resources to other areas as well as inject some additional development and opportunities in that area. So I appreciate the work you've been doing on that, Carl. We're hoping to wrap up that final piece of the sale later this year with a closing sometime in the spring of 2010. I want to just mention on that, just so your viewers are not misled, as part of that project, the county is not in any way, shape or form selling Taylor Park. That's a separate set aside. County is really working to reinvigorate that park. I understand the Sheboygan Downtown Rotary Club is coming forward to be a partner to help revitalize and improve that area to make it more user friendly to the community. So that again is just another piece of the efforts on the part of the county board, the county administration to make each piece of county government vital, useful, and beneficial to the community as a whole. Carl, over the last eight and a half to nine years when you've been our corporation council, you've seen a lot of things and got a good feel for county government. But what do you see as our biggest challenges that are coming up in the future that we have to face? Most definitely the budget. The inability of the state of Wisconsin to get their financial house in order trickles down upon us and makes it harder and harder for us to not only do the mandated tasks required of us, funded or unfunded, but also it makes it more difficult to do the ongoing activities that people expect of their county governments. We expect that our county government is going to provide quality airport. We expect our county government is going to provide security through our law enforcement, an appropriate jail setting for offenders. We expect our health and human service department to provide services to those in need in our community. And it's just impossible or becoming nearly impossible with the constraints that each year's budget from Madison imposes upon our local unit of government. And something's got to give sooner or later. They either have to give us the ability to raise revenues in some other fashion or they've got to supply more money for us if they expect us to do those services or keep the high level of services up that our community expects. But we just have the most current budget and I know that you two are very familiar with the fact that the shared revenues has been flat since how long? 20 years, something like that where the amount of resources the state gives to the county to assist them has been flat and now we're down, what, 3% this year I think from even the flat line that we've had for the last 20 years. It becomes incredibly difficult for you, Mike, as a decision maker for the county to make the tough choices. It becomes incredibly difficult for you, Adam, as the administrator to put into place the decisions that the county board requires of you. And unless we get something solved on the state level, we're always going to be struggling on the county level. Thanks for your perspective on that, Carl. With that, I'll turn it back over to Adam. While you set a mouthful there, it is getting more challenging. Unfortunately, we have a lot of good people in place here and the county boards made good decisions in the past that have helped us be successful today. We're looking to make changes now that will help us in the future. It's just an ongoing circle. And as you work with me and the county board and department heads, I know one of the key things that you assist with is the development of resolutions and ordinances, which is really what the county board uses to make their decisions. And some of our viewers might not be aware, well, what's the difference between a resolution and an ordinance? Well, for the most part, a resolution is an expression of the county board's decision on something of a one-shot deal. The county board may pass a resolution saying, we are going to approve a union contract, or we are going to give the planning director the green light to apply for a grant. In contrast, an ordinance is a more permanent thing. It's an ongoing thing. So for example, the county board may pass an ordinance saying, if we're going to lease space at our county airport to people to put up their own individual hangers on our plot of land, here are the standards that we're going to require of every hanger that goes up there. Similarly, we've got ordinances that deal with ground water, non-metallic mining, some regulations dealing with the subdivisions and things like that. They're a more permanent type of expression of the county's will. So big terms, 34 county board supervisors, there's about eight or nine standing committees, about 115,000 people that live in Sheboygan County. If they want something done, if they want a position taken, if they see an opportunity for a change that requires county board action, not an administrative task, but a policy change, how does the process work, how do they get the ball rolling? Well, the best thing they can do is to contact their own county supervisor. We've got 34 county supervisors, as you've indicated, that comes out to whenever for every three or 4,000, something like that. It's amazing to me how few people know who their county supervisor is. That county supervisor is ready, willing, and able to listen to the constituent, and find some answers out if there's a question, or to bring forward a piece of legislation if the constituent feels that it is of validity and the supervisor agrees. There's a lot of opportunity for the county board to be involved in making life in our community better, and it's a two-way street. They need to know the ideas that their constituents have, and if the constituents give the information, it just improves things all around. Very good. Well done. We're in the midst of developing our 2010 budget right now, and as Carl touched on earlier, with the state budget deficit being at about $6.6 billion, and by the time you see this program, the state budget has been adopted, and we will then work with those rules and implement our own county budget. We're going to have to continue to be more efficient, we're going to have to continue to do more with less, and the county board's going to have to make some tough decisions, whether it's eliminating or reducing programs, looking at new revenue sources. It's really a combination of all above that are going to help us be successful. If you have ideas on how we can become more efficient or more effective, please pass those on to us. Chairman Mike Van der Steen is always readily available to hear suggestions, constructive criticism, every member of the county board, as Carl mentioned. If you don't know who your county board supervisor is, check out the county website, contact our county clerk, and that information will be provided. If you want to contact my office directly, the office of the county administrator, county board chairman, our number is 459-3103. 459-3103, we encourage you to contact us and share your ideas, suggestions for improvement. Also, 22 departments across the board, whether it's the airport or health and human services, our law enforcement with our Sheriff Mike Helpeke, don't hesitate to contact any of our department heads. You may know who some of them are. So, Carl, we certainly appreciate you joining us today. Appreciate the tremendous work that you and your law firm do, a lot of good things happening, and certainly you do a lot of problem solving, which we sure appreciate. Thank you. Until next time, on behalf of county board chairman Mike Van der Steen and the full county board, thank you for joining us, and please pick up that phone, contact your county board supervisor, let us know how we can be of great assistance to you. Thank you.


Okay, so the topic for this time is extremely deep, just like most other topics. I love how most guys who teach, you know, success of development, they make videos and they're like, you know, behind like a cool wallpaper background, maybe a Ferrari in the background. I'm like walking, always, always walking. Yeah, so I walk a lot. I love walking. Most of my business is done actually over the phone, so I just walk a lot, keeps me very healthy, you know, I love to move. Anyway, so the topic today is regarding your gut intuition and basically taking kind of like the journey of self-development, kind of reaching deep within yourself, finding that place where you actually take massive action and follow your journey.   So well, first of all, the voice is real.  So once you do listen to that voice, you have basically a few options. You can either admit that the voice is there, something's not working, something has to change, and then let that voice start making you take action, basically do things that are not normal. Most people will start, weird things will start happening, like you'll see people suddenly not really realizing where you're coming from, because you seem to place less importance, you know, you seem to get less excited and less dramatic to be more precise about things that they find extremely dramatic. So that's the first part of it. And then that kind of develops into what is called the journey. And the journey is where you have this thing you're currently meant to do and you just go ahead and do it. So the journey doesn't necessarily mean you need to be one specific thing, it doesn't mean you have to be like an Olympic swimmer or, you know, the richest man on earth, it just means you have a journey that you need to take right now. And it's part of your self-development and if you resist it, you'll just kind of wither and die, which again, it's a very simple law of nature, it's not, there's nothing personal about it, there's nothing personal about the journey either, it's just a matter of growth and decay, it's a very simple natural process. So once you kind of see where that voice is leading you, and I really recommend you do that by process of meditating. There's too much noise in our society today, there's way too much noise where you're unable to stop and listen to that knowing, that feeling of something's not right in the belly.    So once you kind of accept that voice, which screams like, should, should, should, should, it should be like this, it should be like that, and you don't kind of silence it and go like, oh no, just, you know, that's just the way life is, you know, just accept it, you know, it's just the way it is, man, or even worse, like, don't change it, you know, you can't change it, you can't fight against the way things are. By the way, if you're, if you like that part, I recommend reading The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.  So anyway, you listen to that voice, it tells you where to go, and then you're like, okay, I get the feeling, okay, I understand that my thing, maybe it's to go travel right now, maybe it's to work out, maybe it's to start getting girls, maybe it's to start making more money, whatever it is, but there's something your voice is like, you know, it might not be the end-all-be-all, but it's like, you know, that's, it's like, it shows you where the next step in your journey is, and the more you become successful, the more you follow along the journey, the more times you take it, you kind of get more precise about it, you know, you kind of learn to look at life a lot, lot more in a focused way, in an exact specific way. So the voice kind of becomes a lot more clear, you understand what it says a lot, lot more.  So where this gets to basically is what happens, what's the biggest, biggest, biggest reward you get from the journey is the higher state of consciousness. To be where you want to be, you have to think a lot more clearer, you have to be a lot more focused, a lot more present, a lot more in conjunction with reality. You know, because you'll see that the more successful somebody is, the less delusions he usually has about reality. He's more grounded in how reality actually works, how cause and effect actually works rather than ideas up in his own head, rather than treating something like his feelings too seriously, the more successful somebody is, the more he's focused on his vision and goal and what he should do or needs to do rather than how he feels.  And it probably happened to you, by the way, when you're in a low consciousness mode, obviously you oscillate, but it changes. But again, there's a certain level of consciousness that you reach and it grows whenever you take the journey. So my message to you here is that if you do have that gnawing, that feeling in your stomach that things are not the way they should be, something they should be different.  And feel your body and you'll see it's there.  You know, like how are you feeling right now? Like even right now, we're probably feeling it like that feeling in your stomach where it's like, ah, you know, something's not right. The more you listen to it, the stronger it gets, the stronger it gets, the more you know where you need to go.  But if you put it in regular water, it will actually stay until the water is you know, you gradually hit it up until the water is fully boiling, and then we'll simply die without resisting. By the way, this story is false. It's not really true, but you know, it's kind of a cool story to tell. So that's kind of what happens to you.  But preferably just stop fighting it, you know, you don't need to find that voice, you don't need to fight to find it, you don't need to to work for it. It's there.  I know it looks important, but stop right now.  And again, once you do that, it will guide you. Okay, so let it guide you. It's taking you to a better place.  And again, once you do that, you'll start the journey. That's pretty much the only thing that counts in life. Any other thing is arbitrary. And once you take the journey, figure out what is your path?  Listen to it. Write it down and go for it. And I like to put a number on it because it's usually about taking certain amounts of actions.   But other times it's more complicated.  It's, it's actually deeper. And it's kind of like a direction, you know, do this, do that. So write it down, stare at it every day, let that feeling build up and realize it's not going anywhere.  Because if I don't do it, I feel bad. Like literally, that's for me motivation. I have negative motivation. I do what I do because if I don't, I'm just gonna feel bad.   And then it's really, really happy. You know, maybe that's your journey, your journey may be like, Okay, I need to accept myself. And that's the journey.   I mean, there's no point in finding it. But I'm not gonna, I know I need to work with it. So if I wanted to go away, I need to listen to it. I need to be like, Okay, voice, I'm just gonna do whatever you tell me to do. And then you just follow it.   You know, you start expanding, you start learning more, you start becoming more yourself. So trust me, go, go after the journey. It's worth it. I don't care. If you're already on the journey. If you think you're done, which is the worst, if you think you're done, you're as far off from then as possible. Or if you haven't even started and just listen to the voice, you know, you can always go more, you can always be more intense, you can always go more extreme after the voice. And one last thing that kind of popped in my head right now. Some people might think of this as like being a workaholic, or being stressed constantly.    It's chill.  Definitely not. The voice is on your side.    Or you can listen to the voice. And I'm not saying you're not going to find happiness in your children. Your children might be your journey, if it's too late, you know, maybe, and you're like, okay, so my job is to be the best parent ever, you know, because I've personally been on many journeys, you know, the journey of fitness, and then the journey of, you know, getting as many girls as possible, and then the journey of my relationship, or my whole purpose was to make that relationship work, no matter what, and accept my girlfriend, how she is, and it taught me about love. And then my journey was business, you know, and it still is business.  Yeah, that's pretty much it.  Listen to that voice, listen to what it tells you.  You know, how do you feel? And if you don't feel good, you don't feel good. Don't try denying it.  I know it's a feeling, but, but it's not just the feeling, it's a feeling that kind of points you somewhere.   And then you're gonna focus on the feeling and the more you focus on it, the more clear it gets.  And then it's like, maybe it's this. No, maybe. Yeah. Oh, okay, you're getting a warmer. Maybe.  I need to let go of her. Now you have a choice. Listen to the voice or drown it out again. You know, I hope you listen to it. If you go on the journey, you'll thank me later. So till next time and hopefully very soon. I'll start getting maybe I'll get like a really professional recording equipment actually make it a bit more professional. But I hope you're enjoying it either way. Have a good one. Listen to the voice and be unhappy. Okay, be unhappy. It's good. It's what leads to change. See you later.


So, we're going to start with our first talk today this morning by Raymond Chen, and the title of his talk is Accelerating Academic Research with Impact Certificates. Raymond, take it away. All right. Thank you very much. It's lovely to be here. Good to see people strolling back in from the break. So my name is Raymond Chang, and today I'm here to actually represent the Hyperserts Foundation. The mission of the Hyperserts Foundation is to find new forms of funding for public goods like science, and today I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the latest thoughts that we have around rewarding positive scientific impact with impact markets and impact certificates. So, button. As a former academic researcher, I was at UC Berkeley, I was a faculty member for a short while at University of San Francisco, I came to the Hyperserts Foundation with a pretty simple question, which is how are we going to get an order of magnitude more funding towards basic science and research, because if we're going to get to the future that we all want to get to, there's all sorts of fundamental questions that we need to ask, whether or not it's renewable energy, AI safety, secure infrastructure, curing diseases, what have you. What's core to all of these problems is that there's fundamental questions that we need to answer about how the universe works and how we're going to get there. Funding capital markets are pretty good at funding problems if there's a clear path to revenue ahead of you, but they're not fantastic at solving these long range problems. For things like this, we're going to need some form of public-private coordination. So there's all sorts of evidence that shows that we are just not sufficiently investing in our future. This is a graph of funding over time broken out by different sources, and what you see here is that while US GDP has been growing like this, it's been super linear in the last few decades. Our investments into basic science and research is sub-linear. And while the share of industry growth of how much we're putting money, industry money into science and research, it is growing, but not proportional to the amount of growth that we see in the economy today. It's okay, what are we going to do about this? How can we possibly create markets that might be able to incentivize private money to be able to incentivize investments into longer-term science and research? Well, it is true that we need better civic engagement, political efforts to develop more funding into government agencies. It is the case that we should think about how to better allocate capital resources in philanthropy. Today I'm going to focus on a particular hypothesis that we have at the Hypersource Foundation around building markets around impact.  It includes creating a transparent, open-source, collaborative database of verified impact. It includes driving experiments in new funding mechanisms. And ultimately what we want to arrive at is a rich, heterogeneous ecosystem of impact markets, where we can fund things for the future. This might actually look a little bit familiar to you, and it's pretty similar to how carbon markets work today, but we're kind of imagining this in the space of more general-purpose scientific impact. I'm not going to have enough time to actually go into detail and exactly how every single one of these mechanisms work, but I'm here today because I'm excited to talk to all of you, and if you want to go into more detail, please come find me after this talk. The bedrock of all of this starts with measurement, and the last panel actually did a fantastic job of explaining some of the limitations here, but measurement is the bedrock of creating an economy like this, and we need to be able to move beyond citations towards a rich ecosystem of impact indicators. So similar to how countries today are starting to move past just using GDP as a single indicator for success, we're moving towards baskets of indicators that demonstrate the health of an economy. We need something similar in science, because while citations are fantastic at measuring how ideas permeate between the academic community, they are not a measure of how ideas in science impact government, how they impact industry. For many fields, patents are also not a perfect indicator of that either, though they are one of many indicators that you could use. And ultimately, citations are not a measure of impact on how science impacts the broader society. So if I can come up with a simple example, computer security is a space that I come from. If I could imagine what those look like in computer security, it would be something like, well, what are the vulnerabilities that are being disclosed in these conferences? How long does it take to fix them? What is the severity of them? We have standardized measurements on how to classify severity of a vulnerability. When it comes to crypto systems or distributed systems, we can measure the time it takes to adopt these into market, and what is the reach of these systems when they ultimately do get into market? And we can also measure potentially how different is this from the counterfactual? How different is this? How much of a change, a disruptive change, have we made in terms of people's thinking? Imagine if we actually had these impact indicators spanning over decades. How would that fundamentally change how we do scientific funding policy today? Conferences and journals hold an outsized influence on how we think about reputation and management. I think there's a lot of opportunity here to collaborate with conferences and journals to be able to do more impact measurement. But ultimately, I think we're going to need more support from the funding agencies themselves to be able to measure this impact to be able to attract more capital in. I just wanted to highlight really quickly another project that we're working on at the Hypesurge Foundation, open source observer, where open source software is another public good that is heavily underfunded. And we're trying to create automated mechanisms in a space where it's significantly easier, where you can see the entire software supply chain in an open source way, try to automate some of the impact indicator measurement. Once we have better impact measurements, at the Hypesurge Foundation, we're also working on an open source data model where we can transparently, traceably, and transferably measure the information that comes from these impact measurements. We need to work together to build an open source database of impact. And ultimately, we want to be able to use this to better communicate how impact is affecting the funders, potentially attract more funding into the industry, into science, better communicate to policymakers what's working, potentially signal what things may not. And perhaps even more importantly, indicate to society the impact that science is having on the broader world. What we're hoping is that by capturing impact into standardized certificates, we can create a powerful new feedback loop that doesn't quite exist as well today as it could. So we have coordinators generating work that's generating impact. We have evaluators that are evaluating that work and making impact evaluations against these impact claims. And that, hopefully, can better fuel this feedback loop between funders and projects so that funders can have better steer their money towards things that are going to generate impact. Potentially, these could also serve as better vehicles for international collaboration where countries can also coordinate around shared goals and shared outcomes that are desirable. What we're hoping for is once we have this bedrock of impact measurement and impact certificates, we have now a fertile testing ground for all new sorts of potential market mechanisms that we can test on top of them. So we have plenty of grants today, but imagine a world where we could have better bounties, potentially more fine-screen bounties, potentially recurring bounties. Now we're starting to enter the world of things about retrospective funding. We can also experiment with novel types of mechanisms like advanced market commitments or dominant assurance contracts, all sorts of different mechanisms today that can help assure that we're going to move towards the forms of impact that we care about. We can also learn from other adjacent fields as well. So in social services, we have things like social impact bonds now, where we're starting to test whether or not we can create financial incentives for social goals. Similarly, in health care, we have things like capitated markets. We can learn from these adjacent fields and see if we can create markets that incentivize positive social outcomes. Ultimately, I think by experimenting in markets for impact, we want to see if we can get more money into public research. We want to see if we can generate better alignment between the scientific community and industry. And we want to see if we can potentially have better measures of ROI, not necessarily fiscal measures of ROI, but what is the return that we're getting on our investment? Ultimately, the goal here is to create incentive-compatible mechanisms where institutions and researchers can get rewarded for generating work with more impact in ways that are compatible with the existing incentive mechanisms that we see in science and research. So I'm going to list a number of open problems. We're not going to have time to go into detail of all of these, but these are the types of things that I would love to talk to you about during the conference. So first of all, top on my mind is I do not want to create a mechanism that crowds out non-market values. Scientists do not go into the space, myself included. I'm sure all of you guys relate to this, do not come into the space to get rich. And I want to make sure we can maintain a culture of public good and open access. And I don't think that impact markets are going to be a cure all for all forms of science. I do not want to create a system that overly skews towards fields that only have clearly measurable impact. I think there's a way that we can design this that can be more balanced. There's also going to be limitations in our ability to foresee what constitutes a desirable outcome, what constitutes measurable impact. And so I'd also don't want to be short-sighted in a very different way. And largely from an organizational logistical perspective, this is going to be quite difficult. This is going to be a big lift for our community, which is to say that impact measurement, as they mentioned during the panel, is expensive at scale. And there's going to be fundamental problems around how do we make sure that we attribute the right impact, especially if we're measuring over decades. But if you're interested in these types of problems, please come find me. I think there's a lot of opportunity here to innovate. Thank you. Great, so we've got about two minutes for questions. Anyone have questions? Jordy Goodman, Boston University School of Law. I have a question about bias and how you're going to incorporate, especially gender bias or race bias into the impact factors that you're going to use for this. Yeah, so that's a great question. And I think one of the things that I want to embody into the system is, like I said earlier, heterogeneous baskets of different value systems encoded in different impact valuators and different impact indicators. So I don't see a world where every funder is going to agree on exactly how to weight every form of scientific impact indicator. I think there will be communities and there will be funders that weight things differently. And one of the things that we should absolutely be measuring are goals around DEI, et cetera. So I think it's going to be up to the funder ultimately, but my hope is that we can create indicators that are a broad measure of all of our value systems. I think the goal of the impact indicator is not to strictly measure financial outcomes. The goal here is to embody social outcomes or embody other types of outcomes that we care about as a society that are not strictly measured in terms of cash flow, which is what markets are designed for today. So I totally agree with you, and I think there's a rich space for innovating on different types of indicators. So we've got time for just one more quick question and maybe a very short answer. OK. So thank you very much for this talk, and this question is not for derailing your idea, but to just wonder how this example would fit in there. So in 1919, we drove ships to India, and we looked at the sun, the solar eclipse then, and we measured the general relativity. And so this was never intended to be able to do GPS 100 years later, which now saves millions of lives. So how do you see these very unconnected things working in your system that have very long-term implications, but we don't realize them now? Yeah, I completely agree. I don't have a clear answer to this. I think this is going to be a longer conversation, so I'm happy to take this offline if that's easier. But ultimately, I think that speaks to what I was talking about earlier with respect to attribution that is challenging. And I think there are impact markets for impact markets where you can create secondary markets as well, depending on how the flow of influence kind of spreads through science. But let's talk about that after. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks.


Okay, so with this, we now have a good handle at the basics of noise and noise parameters. Now here in the simple mode, you can see that the buckets, as I mentioned, as well as the measurement goals, are actually static, right? As I explained, we have these buckets that are already preset, we have these dimensions that are already preset, and all of these are really here to help you get started when you use noise lab for the first time. But in reality, all these measurement goals, as well as the dimensions and the buckets are completely use case specific, right? So what I'm going to want to do if I want to run a more advanced simulation is actually configure this. So for that, we're going to go ahead and move on to the advanced mode, which by the way also includes a number of additional features and a more flexibility in setting your parameters that we'll be getting to in the next sections. But first of all, let me move on to the advanced mode. And what we're going to do, first of all, is to run a simulation. You can see that the default settings in the advanced mode are similar to the default settings in the simple mode. The measurement goals are the same, and the dimensions are the same as well. As for the daily attributable compression count per bucket, it's roughly the same, so we're going to land on the same orders of magnitude for noise. So let me go ahead and run the first default simulation in the advanced mode. All right, so here we have it, our first simulation in the advanced mode.


All right. Well, good morning. Second lecture on evolution. I'm going to always try to start off with just asking if there are any questions. So does anybody have questions about the last lecture? There wasn't. I mean, we basically went over what the form of a scientific theory of evolution would be. Especially, you have to make this uniformitarian assumption. And I spoke a little bit about Darwin with the main points here being that the fellow was wealthy and self-sufficient, like all these scientists were at the time. There was no real professional scientist at that time. He had a remarkable opportunity right after college to sort of see the world. But back then, the world really was unknown and like now. And so he was in a five-year voyage on the Darwin where he really formulated some of his ideas, at least. It was a good exercise in mulling over what he called the transmutation of species. Spent the next 20 years after the voyage amassing facts in support of his theory and really wasn't prodded into publishing until he had to, basically, until he was going to be scooped. Now, there are a couple of things I didn't mention. And somebody asked, why do I need to know about this? Of course, I said it and I put in the slides. I want you to have some general idea of what Darwin's life was like. But as in everything in life, you have to focus in on what you think are the more important things. And I try on the exams not to trick you up with trivial questions. The questions I put on the exam are things that I really think you should know. And I think Darwin's life is, yes, it is. So other people don't think so. How about now? OK, so if it's, yeah, I don't know what the problem is. But if you can hear me, that's good. If you can't, then you could move up as well, because there's still seating up here as well. So anyways, where was I? Oh, yes. And so he did spend the next 20 years in mass effects, but that wasn't the only thing he did. Of course, he got married, raised a family, lots of kids. But he also published a very popular travel log of his journey. It was for the general public. He published one of his first publications, Scientific Publications, was on the formation of coral reefs. And his explanation for our coral reefs in the South Pacific form is still the accepted model. And he also spent, believe it or not, an inordinately long amount of time studying barnacles of all things. So he published several monographs on barnacles. And the reason he did that was to sort of, I don't know what you say, get a street creds or something. Basically, he wanted to have the credentials so other scientists would take him seriously. And of course, they did. So by the time the Origin of Species was published, it wasn't like Darwin was some unknown figure. Other scientists, other naturalist biologists at the time knew about Darwin. Some even knew that he was working on this particular project and knew the outline of his theory. Now, just as an aside, there's been a lot written about him. Last year, February 12, 1809 was his birthday. So last year was his 200th birthday, so to speak. Obviously, he's not with us anymore. But a lot has been written on the guy. Lots of biographies have been written on him. And so if you're interested, I can point you to some biographies if you really want to read more about his life. But as far as we're concerned, the main publication that you, I should also say after the Origin of Species, he continued to write. He wrote a very influential book on the descent of man. So actually in the Origin of Species, he doesn't really even touch human evolution, but later he does. And he wrote a book on the action of earthworms, of all things. It turns out earthworms actually change the landscape a lot more than you can imagine. So you put a boulder out in the field, and over time the boulder sort of sinks into the earth. It's because of earthworms. And so Darwin was always enamored by these processes that act slowly, but surely over time it can have large effects over time. And so earthworms is kind of in its purview in that sense. But the Origin of Species is the main book we need to be worried about. It's a good book, it's an accessible book. So it's one of the most famous publications, scientific publications of all time. And unlike many of them, so I'll tell you that I, if I were to look at some of the physics literature, some of the foundations of physics, I would be lost, right? It's rough going. Origin of Species is a very famous influential scientific publication that is accessible now. So it's in principle a book that you could read and understand its arguments as well as anybody. So it's not a bad book to read. Now what I'm gonna do here is just outline the arguments he makes in the book. I'm not gonna go chapter by chapter, but I think there's actually kind of that order there. But I'm just gonna outline the major arguments he made. So let's start. Screen up, blank screen. And I think I can control the lights on the screen as full lights will do. All right, well that'll have to do. So he starts off the book talking about things that everybody at the time knew about. So you have to remember the Victorian era, which is when this was written, many more people than today have some experience on a farm. Maybe they're even raised on a farm, right? Now it's very uncommon. The last person in my family, for instance, who spent any time on a farm with my grandfather on just one side, is probably the same in your families as well. So people back then were much more familiar with the type of variation you would see in domestication. So he spoke about variation in domestic animals and plants, things that people understood, okay? And the basic argument he's made is something that nobody at the time would disagree with, nobody at today would disagree with either. And it's the simple observation that, you know, yes, I'm getting a message from back there. All right, so I'm getting a message from above that says that I'm not to use this board, but this one because I guess there's people in the neighboring lecture halls. Even though they realize that there's lots of space here, do we have to project to the other rooms now? So sorry for the interruption. We'll fix this, I hope. So I will walk right over here, I suppose. So let's do that. So you can talk about variation in domesticated species. Nobody disagreed with this, you can see it. So the basic argument is that it's like a litter of puppies, there's obvious variation. If you have horses, they vary one from another, okay? That this is not, this isn't rocket science as part of this argument, okay? The other, so the one part is that variation is there. Like I said, he's building up this argument starting with facts that nobody disagrees with. The next thing he talked about was that there's heritability. So offspring resemble their parents. Once again, this is an argument that nobody at that time would disagree with. In fact, farmers would use this fact that there's variation among individuals and that offspring resemble their parents to selectively breed organisms, right? So he also talks about selective breeding. So these are the main things he talks about early on in this book about domesticated organisms. Variation, there's resemblance between offspring and the parents, and that if you're a farmer or if you're interested, you can actually select for traits that you're interested in based on this variation. If you're interested in having a very fast horse, you breed together fast horses, right? You take the very fastest in your herd and you mate those guys. And those in the offspring will tend to be faster than the average horse. That's the argument. If you want a cow that produces lots of milk, you take your best milker and you always make certain you breed her. And if you have some cow that doesn't produce very much milk, you make certain you don't breed her. Okay, these are things that farmers have used for millennia, actually, before the origin of species. Whether or not they realized how they were doing it, but they did it. That's how we have domesticated crops, right? By breeding certain or making certain, only certain individuals reproduce, the ones that have the traits that we're interested in. Not necessarily the traits that'll be useful in nature, but the ones that we're interested in. Interestingly, Darwin, in the first chapter of the book, he amasses lots of facts on all three of these points. And he's spent a lot of time hobnobbing with pigeon breeders, for instance. So he actually started breeding his own pigeons. And so you have to remember, I believe that English society is still pretty stratified, but back in the Victorian era, it was very much more stratified by class than it is even today. And so to have a gentleman of Darwin's status, one of the few places you could actually see interactions between classes was in these sort of specialty clubs, if you will. So he would hobnob with people of different classes talking about pigeon breeding. And what he learned in his discussions with pigeon breeders is that if you wanted a certain trait, that pigeon in your birds, that pigeon breeder could give it to you, give it enough time. You want some specific feather ornamentation on the head, that pigeon breeder could do it. And you do it by looking for any individuals among the pigeons that are out there that had even the slight beginning of the type of variation that you're interested in. Then you can start to breed for more extreme variants of that. So if you want a big, tough to feathers on the head that you look for individuals that have at least some tough, tough, you know, the feathers then you can continue breeding for individuals that have more and more toughs on their head, for instance, okay. And one last point I want to make here is that he also argues that there appears to be no limit to the amount by which you can make these traits change. Okay, so as an example, here's, whoops, I have to go back to the, this is the first year I've ever had trouble with this in this class. So I don't know what's going on. There's another try. We're there. So anyways, the dog breeds for another thing that people are familiar with and that he discusses in the origin of species. And the ancestor of dogs was a wolf, right? So this is well known now. So there's been lots of studies. You know, wolves and dogs obviously interbreed. I used to have a dog that was half one quarter wolf. But you know, so that they obviously interbreed they're the same species, but humans are the ones that, you know, selected for different traits to generate the great variation that you're aware of in dog species. We have these little tiny things here, giant dogs. This, by the way, is the dog that I promised my daughter when we moved up here to Berkeley from San Diego. It worked like a charm, a golden retriever. But the point here is that this is the type of variation that you guys are familiar with as well. This was all produced by selective breeding for different traits. And in fact, this dog, I'll just give you a little bit, it's interesting because golden retrievers, you know what they're like. They're kind of tennis ball crazed animals. But this dog came from my PhD advisor who's in central Texas and he's a hunter and obviously a very good biologist. And so he and some other Texas hunters who happen to be professors at different Texas universities are trying to breed golden retrievers that are good hunting dogs but have less guard hair along the fur in the bottom.   And so this, my dog actually is one of the results of this and she's a beautiful golden retriever, clearly a golden retriever, but she's not as toughy as a lot of these golden retrievers like the show golden so we don't talk about in our family, okay? So there's just an example of some, you know, the types of variation that we can see under domestication that's caused by just selecting for those traits that vary naturally within a species. So that is the first part of his argument. He then changes just a little bit and says, look, that's what happens in domesticated organisms. He then turns his attention to variation in the wild. And he makes at least two points here. He says that, look, if you go out and look at organisms that aren't domesticated, that we see the same sorts of things. We see that organisms vary one from the other, okay? And you have to remember this is a time where the hobby, so to speak, for a lot of Victorian people was to go collect things. So this was a time when people liked to collect, like, well, there were lots of burrs, they liked to collect things like eggs, beetles, insect collections. Often you go into a house and if it was a well-cultured family, they would have a curio cabinet where they would have displayed some of the things that they'd collected, rocks, organisms, whatever, okay? And so people were aware once again that organisms varied in nature, okay? That was not a surprise. And he argues that the type of variation you see in nature is of the same sort and the same degree as we'd see in domesticated species. And he also argues that the variation you see in the wild is also heritable, that is to say, once again, that offspring resemble their parents. Once again, nothing controversies. He realized he had a very explosive idea. He wanted to present this idea very, very carefully, right? He didn't want people to be turned off from the idea once. So he starts off in kind of the way a cagey salesman would. So you know how salesmen work. My kids were always really upset by this guy that sold this oxy-clean thing because he always would interrupt their cartoons or whatever it was that they were watching. But he would do things like, do you want to be well-liked? And of course you'd say, well, yeah, I want to be well-liked and do you want to be good looking? Well, of course I want to be good looking. You want to be successful? Yes, I want to be successful. And then he drops it on you. Then you need to buy my Herodgel product, right? Darwin is doing the same type of thing. He's telling you things that of course the only response is yes or I agree, right? I do believe in people who say yes, of course. Things vary. Of course offspring resemble their parents and of course people can breed for the traits they want. And yes, we are aware that in the wild we have variation and that the variation is the same type and the same degree that we see in living species. So these were things, these were arguments that nobody found controversial, not at all. And the third point he makes is a little bit more controversial. It's something that people could be convinced of but they hadn't thought about it. He talks about the struggle for existence. Now why this was a more controversial statement is because at the time people had this idea of what you might call natural theology. That is to say that out in nature things are great. That it's sort of a harmonious working of parts that there isn't a struggle for existence. That nature was made for the use of humans. So this is sort of this harmonious, that nature is sort of a harmonious working of parts. Darwin says no way. If you look out there in the real world and he was a very devoted naturalist, a very keen observer, he says, what you see is things eating each other, right? That's not harmonious at all. You see lions chasing down the gazelle and eating them. You see the gazelle running away from the lions as fast as they can for dear life. You see that if you look within a species you often see not organisms working together but stepping on one another to get access to mates, for instance. It's not harmonious at all. And the main thing he talks about is that excessive reproductive potential. I don't think I call it in the notes but you can call it whatever you want. But the basic idea here is that organisms have the potential to produce many, many more offspring than could ever live. I don't know if you've ever worked in a lab but you take one little E. coli and in the right conditions, 37 degrees Celsius, overnight you can have a culture than that flask that's so dense that they start to die. But you can imagine that if you had just gave it a big enough flask, if you could make the entire world a flask, that within maybe a month you could have a world-sized flask just chock full of E. coli. I'm just giving you a made-up example. But he used the example of elephants. Even elephants have a remarkable access growth potential. You've given them enough time and without elephants dying natural causes or being, they could actually populate the world, need to be knee-deep or I guess it wouldn't be knee-deep, you'd be many heads high in elephants before you know it. So they have an excess reproductive potential and here he was very influenced by an essay by Malthus which you've probably heard of this name. People sometimes still talk about Malthusian crises. Anybody know what that is? Too many people, right? So that's not a new idea. Malthus wrote his essay in the 1700s, right? And the basic idea is that if you were to sort of make a plot, you know, here's time and then here's, well, we'll say how populations grow. You typically see this type of pattern. This is typical of human growth as well. You see what's called an exponential growth pattern. It's, this is a, all organisms pretty much have the same type of population growth potential. But what do you say about the food supply? Well, the food supply doesn't act by one organism doubling and having two which gives you an exponential pattern. It means you add a new field, right? It grows linearly. And so he says, look, if you look at the, how crop production increases, it grows linearly. And the concern was at some point in the future, Malthus' concern, I guess it's still a concern that many people have now, is that at some point the population, human population will outstrip food production and then we're in trouble. Now of course, the reason why we've been able to put off a Malthusian crisis for so long is because of selective breeding, right? We actually, our crops are much more productive than they were in the past and we've industrialized crop production and so forth. So we've been able to increase the food supply much more quickly than just linearly but the concern still holds, right? But he says that the same sort of situation holds for any organism where they always have this very excessive population growth potential but the resources are always gonna be limited, okay? So there's gonna be by necessity, by necessity some sort of struggle for existence. Now this, like I said, was a little bit more controversial but it was still a point that people could believe. The first two points I made, variation in the wild and in domesticated organisms, no problem. People already knew that, he's just telling them what they knew. This is the first point where he starts to talk about something new or at least something that may have been unfamiliar to many of the readers at the time but it's something they could believe. They just had to be convinced that, oh yeah, okay, well in nature things aren't as harmonious as I thought or assumed, okay. All right, so in the fourth part of his argument he drops the big one. This is where he introduces the idea of natural selection. Do you wanna buy my hair gel, so to speak? He argues that if individuals have some sort of variation, some, they bear a trait that allows them to better reproduce or survive in this struggle for existence that they will leave more offspring in the next generation and because of the fact that offspring resemble their parents, the offspring will tend to have that trait as well and also reproduce and survive better. And by necessity, by necessity you have to have a change in the frequency of that trait in the next generation. If you're the individuals with a particular trait or the ones that are surviving at a higher rate and reproducing at a higher rate, then that trait has to be disproportionately represented in the next generation. That's all there is to it. Right now if he had stated this argument flatly in the very beginning of his book, like I imagine he was very tempted to do, it's hard to know how people would have responded to it, but he basically built up the argument leading to this point. And so it was much easier to believe the individual arguments, the individual components of his argument, variation, inheritability, and the struggle for existence. Those three things together necessarily lead to that trait, traits that allow you to reproduce or survive better. It necessarily leads to that trait being represented at a higher fraction or higher proportion in the next generation. That is the key argument. This argument is why Darwin is justly famous because it's a natural process that can lead to adaptation. It's a natural process that can lead organisms to become adapted to their environment, bear traits that look as if they could be designed but were actually the result of a natural process. Is that clear? This is something I would expect you to know as it's sort of the foundation of all evolutionary biology. Okay, so there's a couple of things to note here. One, I can call it A, is the species that changes. Unlike the Marx theory where the individuals might be changing over their lifetime and then leaving the traits that had changed to their offspring, this is one where organisms either have the trait or they don't, right? Organisms either survive to reproductive age or they die. Individuals either at reproductive age reproduce or they don't, right? The individuals, their genetic makeup is not changing over time. It's the species, the composition of the species that is changing. The composition of the frequency of different traits in the species is what's changing, not the individuals. The individual makeup of a species is, right now our species is composed of all the individuals in this room and all the individuals outside of this room, right? In the next generation, there'll be another set of individuals and that generation may or may not differ in its frequency for different traits, okay? But the point is it's not us that's changing. It's the differential reproduction and survival of us individuals that determines the composition of the next generation. That should be obvious. So that's one thing. Another point he makes is that traits can evolve under natural selection only if they are beneficial to the individual, okay? That is to say that there can only be beneficial to those individuals bearing the trait. So what he's arguing is you can't have traits that are evolving because they help somebody else out. So this is one of his key arguments. He says if you ever find that situation then his theory is in trouble, okay? Now, normally I would give a lecture on what's called kin selection, which is the evolution of altruistic behavior and this is something that people pondered for a long time, how could altruistic behavior, seemingly altruistic behavior ever evolve? And the answer is basically you're helping individuals that are closely related to you. So things like wasps and bees where you have this hive and some of the individuals forego reproduction, you're actually helping those individuals that are foregoing reproduction are actually helping out very highly related individuals. So we've actually got the theory that can explain seemingly altruistic behavior, but if we ever see a case which, for instance, altruistic behavior that can't be explained because you're helping out related individuals, then the theory is in trouble, okay? And he states that right up front, okay? So the first four parts of his, first four chapters of the book actually do introduce the argument just as I laid it out. He then sort of, the rest of the book, he basically talks about the ramifications of the theory.  So where was I, I'm on five, right?  One is the lack of intermediate forms. Okay, now he argues that there's two types of intermediate forms that we could be talking about here. Okay, and so I'm gonna talk about each one individually. So the first one he talks about is one that's easy to dispose of quite quickly. So if you have A and B, he argues why do you not see species, for instance, living today that are all intermediate between A and B? Why do we not see all the different potential gradations between species? Why are there gaps in what we see out there in life? Meaning gaps in the form or the how species look? Why do we not see a continued gradation between humans and chimps or any other two species that you might choose? And this one he disposes of quite quickly. He says, look, during the evolution of these organisms, they continue to evolve. It's not like you have to leave descendants species at every single intermediate point. This is not part of this theory. It's just that you have a population, or we'll talk about population, if you talk about species, the compositions change and it doesn't mean you have to have at every single generation or every single intermediate point those individuals surviving to the present. They continue to evolve into the next generation. So that argument was pretty easy to deal with. The one that's a little bit less easy to deal with is there's a prediction that's made here. The idea is if we were to go into the rock record, if we were to look back in time, we should see the intermediate forms between these species. That is to say, sure, things change from one population to the next or one species generation to the next, but that does predict that those species, there was some species, or the species was alive in the past, first of all, and the question is why do we not see representatives of that species at intermediate points in the fossil record? And that's it. That's all there is to it. So we should be seeing all these intermediate forms. And its argument is a simple one and one that's been well proven today is that the rock record is an imperfect one. The geological history of the earth does not, first of all, not all rocks are represented for all time that's out there. And secondly, the fossilization process, the process by which organisms make it into the fossil record, is a rare one. It doesn't happen on a, well, maybe happen on a daily basis, but it's not like you can expect every intermediate to be found. And so this is something that was beginning to be well understood at the time. This is basically the early 1800s, late 1700s was a period where a modern geology was being founded as a science. It was largely at least at first being done by people that were building canals. So these engineers were building canals around Great Britain to move freight from one place to another. Of course, when you dig a canal you're digging into the earth. And what they saw is that when they dug into the earth they were exposing rocks which occur in layers if they're sedimentary. They're formed by the formation of particles settling out of water. You can see these sedimentary rocks if you drive anywhere really and look at road cuts where people cut through parts of a hill to make the road more level, those are road cuts. You look at these road cuts you'll often see sedimentary rocks exposed. They form layers, these layers are called strata. And at that time people were starting to realize that the strata could be dated not by putting years on them. That's something that was only occurred in the 1950s when people were able to radiometrically date rocks. But they were able to discover the relative order of the rocks. And they were able to name groups of rocks from specific periods of time. So if you've heard of the Cambrian period or the Cretaceous, you guys will be required to remember the periods of the earth later when we get to it. But they were just starting to name the rock layers. And the one way they did it is they realized that different rock layers had their own composition of fossils. That if you looked at the oldest rock layers, you didn't see any fossils. But some of the younger ones would have things like, you might first see the lowest rocks having trilobites, things like trilobites. And some of the later ones having more mollusks, things like snails and clams. And the more recent, the layers that were near the top had organisms that most closely resembled the species that are alive today. That's one thing that they understood before Darwin wrote The Origin of Species. What he argued was that there's, and what I sort of mentioned in the first lecture is that when you look at the exposed section of rock like this, most of the time isn't in the rock. So if you were to say, okay, where is the time in this sequence of rocks? The time is actually in the layers between the rocks. As I say, most of the time is represented by no rock at all. And all that means is that rocks don't form continuously except in some sedimentary environments like the deep ocean is where you actually see the most constant formation of rocks. Most of the time rock formation is very episodic. And by necessity, because fossils are only found in sedimentary rocks, therefore the fossilization process is also sporadic. Now we will talk in more detail in a later lecture when I talk about fossils and the fossil record about the process of fossilization. It's a field that's actually called, it's got a name, I'll introduce it to you now since I'll talk about it later. Tefonamine, it's a sub-discipline in paleontology, if you will, that studies how fossils are formed. Basically it's the study of everything that occurs from the time an organism dies to the time it finds itself in a museum cabinet. But anyways, his explanation for why we see intermediate forms in the rock record is because the fossil record is imperfect. Now what is known, what was known at the time about the fossil record was consistent with the theory of evolution. For instance, this progression of forms with the most recent ones, the top layers, the youngest rocks bearing organisms that most closely resembled the organisms living today, that was known. What's been discovered since is probably beyond Darwin's wildest dreams, in terms of finding intermediate forms. And we will talk about some of the most spectacular intermediate forms when I get to the fossil record lecture. But for instance, we have a well-documented sequence between, say, birds over here and crocodiles. So crocodiles and birds are each other's closest living relatives. And we have lots of fossils, including things that we call dinosaurs down here that are intermediate between crocodiles and birds. Birds are actually descended from dinosaurs, as we'll find out. And we can actually, there are certain dinosaurs that very closely resemble ancestral birds, as we actually have a pretty good sequence of intermediate forms. We also have good intermediate today, at least, not at Darwin's time. We have a good intermediate form between whales. I think cow would be a good example here. Closely related mammals, right? Whales proved to be really difficult to place in them. They always, people always knew their mammals, of course, but they proved very difficult to place in the evolutionary tree of life because they are so different. Their environment is so extreme that they've had all sorts of adaptations and it's very difficult to recognize any features in common between whales and other critters. But in the last, actually last just couple of decades, all sorts of intermediate whales, including some that have well-formed hind legs and structures in the ankle that are the same structures as we see in things like cows. So anyway, so just to give an example of some intermediate forms we have today. But at the time Darwin wrote, there were some examples of intermediate forms, but the fossil record was poorly understood and he just sort of brushed it off by saying, look, the fossil record's imperfect, but what is known as seems to be consistent with my theory. All right, so that is one thing he talks about. And large transitions, okay? So what he means by this is how do we get really complicated structures? How do we get something as complicated as the eye, for instance? You look at the eye, there's lots of pieces that all interact together to produce something that I can focus, not as well as I used to be able to, but I can focus on you. There's mechanisms that keep my eyes watered, that keep material from getting into it. It's a remarkable device when you think about it, right? And the question is, how do these large transitions occur? And he argues that during the course of the evolution of any complex structure, all the intermediate forms have to be beneficial. They should be better than what came before, okay? So if you can come up with an example where the intermediate forms don't work well, that would be a problem for the theory, okay? So eyes are actually not a very difficult situation. I'll show you an example in the slides in a bit, but it's such a mental exercise to get the projector switch that I think I'll hold off a little bit on that. But basically going from organisms that you can actually see out there today that just have photoreceptive cells on the skin, to things that have those photoreceptors buried in a pocket so that they can actually tell a little bit more of the direction from which a light source is coming, to things that have sort of a pinhole camera arrangement in the opening here, but the photoreceptors down here at the bottom of this pocket, if you ever made a pinhole camera, you know you can kind of focus things a bit, or at least get a more sharp image with a pinhole camera, to things that have a lens with photoreceptor cells in the bottom. These are the types of transitions that people, I mean, turns out frankly, eyes aren't very difficult to evolve. They've evolved many times, dozens of times it appears in the course of the history of life. And these are just the types of eyes you can see among mollusks, with for instance, squid having quite complicated eyes, and other mollusks having, like some clams having just photoreceptors, okay? But basically, with eyes, it's not such a difficult argument, but what about wings, right? I'll argue that if I'm in an airplane, I don't wanna see my airplane have half the wing length that had before, right? Half a wing is not very useful. You either fly or you don't, okay? And so there's some structures where it's difficult to, or more difficult at least, to argue how could that complex structure have evolved? To fly you need to have just the aerodynamics necessitates having a wing of a certain length. If you have a wing half that length, you're not flying. And so one of the arguments he makes is that in many cases it could be the case that a structure that is now being used for one purpose actually evolved for another purpose. So for instance, going to the wing example, at least with the birds, a lot of the features we associate with flight, such as feathers, actually are found in dinosaurs that could not have flown. They didn't have wings, but they had feathers, for instance. So a lot of the structures, so whatever feathers are used for now and during flight, and they're actually well adapted for flight, they didn't evolve for flight. They evolve for some other purpose, perhaps thermoregulation, we don't know for sure, but they certainly didn't evolve for flight. Hollow bones is another hallmark of birds, which is an obvious adaptation for flight, right? You make a bone that's less dense and less heavy. But it turns out that hollow bones are found in things like Tyrannosaurus rex, things that obviously didn't fly. So what in the Tyrannosaurus rex is on that march towards birds, so to speak. So clearly, many of these dinosaurs had hollow bones and did not fly, and the hollow bones in birds are just inherited from these ancestors. They're now used because, I mean, it's very useful to have them for flight, but they did not evolve for that purpose. So there's some, go ahead. Diving, what, to hold more air, I think? I think they might actually, there's some sort of complicated pneumatic system in birds for oxygenating blood, and I believe that the bones play a role in that. But it might actually, I don't know for a fact about this, but people have studied the bones and dinosaurs with the thought being, you can actually tell warm-blooded versus cold-blooded creatures by how the bones grow. And so there's this controversy among paleontologists about whether some, at least some dinosaurs were warm-blooded, they were able to regulate their body temperature. But I don't know if these dinosaurs could actually use the hollow bones for the same purposes that birds do today. But for whatever reason that you have these hollow bones evolving, it wasn't for flight, is my main point here. Okay, so anyway, so he does talk about these concerns he had, and he actually writes in his diary that sometimes he stayed up late at night worrying about eyes. All right, so the sixth part of his argument was a little bit more positive. So the fifth part he's arguing, look, these are some of the problems that I know you're gonna see, but let's talk about them. The sixth part of his argument is, hey, but you know, I can actually explain a whole bunch of things that the current model of how species formed can't, okay? So, neat things he could explain. So I'll just reiterate, you know, he says, look, the fossil record's imperfect, but what we do know of the fossil record is consistent with this theory of natural selection, evolution by natural selection, okay? And I should point out at this point that a lot of people talk about intermediate forms, and some people like to point out, well, this fossil record is never complete enough for their, you know, you can give them a very complete sequence of intermediate forms, but then they start to point to the intermediate forms and say, well, what about the intermediate forms between these intermediate forms, right? So you can keep going down, you know, you can't, there's gonna be a limit to the resolution that fossil record has. But there's another aspect of the fossil record which people forget, and that is that we can make predictions about when we should find intermediate forms. So it's not like just the presence of the intermediate form is enough, but the theory can actually predict with other observations we have when intermediate forms should be there. So for instance, I'll give you one example that you're probably gonna be interested in. It turns out that humans and chimps are each other's closest relatives. The chimpanzee is more closely related to us than the chimps is related to, say, the gorilla. That's a remarkable fact that we're most closely related to chimps. And the molecular data, so we can actually, we have full genomes of humans, we have the full genome of chimps, we have the full genome of gorillas now as well. But even before we had the full genomes, we had bits of the genomes, individual genes. And the prediction based on the molecular data said that this split occurred somewhere between, say, five and seven million years ago. The common ancestor of human and chimps probably lived about five to seven million years ago. So what does that mean?  You could look and those rocks have been well worked over by other paleontologists, but nobody's ever found anything that remotely, not having found a mammal in Cambrian rocks, 500 million years. What Tim did is he, we had examples of humans that go back, well, certainly lots of representatives here. We had things like Lucy that you've heard of, Australopithecus afarensis, which we'll talk about, somebody we'll talk about in the last lecture, about, what is that, about three million years ago. But that was the oldest we'd really had. There were like a few scraps, like a few molars that are about five million years ago, but that's not super exciting. So he said, look, I'm interested in this part of human history, the part that's the oldest. And so he went to rocks that were about four million years old. He didn't go to rocks that were seven or eight million years ago. He went to rocks that were four million years ago. And then he went to the place that chimps live in Africa. So he went to Africa. He didn't go to Siberia and look for these things. He went to a specific place where he thought he would find them because they're living, they're closest living relatives of humans live there. And he found it. He found human ancestors or hominids, things that are on this line leading to humans, about 4.4 million years ago, that are 4.4 million years old. This is, once again, it's a very imperfect record, but our record of humans, for instance, have a sort of admirably complete set of transitional forms for lucky for us. If chimps ever become interested enough in their own history, they're out of luck. There's only one arm bone that's known in the entire lineage between chimps and the human chimp lineage on this side. And it's because chimps live in forests and forests don't preserve fossils very well.  It's very grim. But the ancestors of humans lived in an environment which was more conducive to fossilization. We're lucky in that respect at least. So anyway, so what was known about the fossil record was consistent with this theory. Oh, he talks about fossil record, biogeography. Biogeography is the study of the distribution of species on the planet, where they live. And he argues that, for instance, you're all aware that there's lots of marsupials in Australia, things that like kangaroos that hop around, quala bears, all these things that are marsupials. They have a pouch and they're young or born very prematurely, but then they do a lot of the development in a pouch. Those are marsupials. Why do they all live in Australia? Why do almost all of them live in Australia? Well, the argument is that their ancestors lived there. So he could explain why species that are similar in their traits live in one place or in one area. And that's because their ancestors lived there. That's easy to explain with the theory of evolution by natural selection. Not so easy under any other theory that was present at the time. I think I wanna take a quick break and go to a few of the slides. See how this will work. Switch. See if it goes smoothly this time. Okay, so here's just an example of some of the different types of eyes you find in mollusks going from photoreceptive cells that are just on the, that just say yes, something's there to the photoreceptive cells being in hollow disks. These are the different forms that can be found just in mollusks. And this is what I wanted to talk about with biogeography that this is just the study of the distribution of organisms and a good example is the species that are found in the New World versus the Old World, the New World being North and South America, the Old World being Africa, Europe and Asia. And what you see is there's a greater similarity within this area, within these continental areas than between. So as an example, might have heard of New World and Old World monkeys. The New World monkeys live in the New World, right? And they're found in South America, they have a flat nose, so they all have similar features and they have three premolars. Whereas the Old World monkeys, and we're more closely related to these guys, live in Europe, Africa and Asia, they're Old World, they have a hooked nose and they have two premolars. But this is a pattern that can easily be explained by evolution because you just pause it that the ancestors of these creatures also live in those same areas. And so the reason why we have all these New World species with three premolars is because their ancestors lived in the New World and they had three premolars. That's all there is to it. I'm going to start, this will be the first thing I say in the next lecture. And so I've got a little bit more I wanna finish up here and then we'll move on to the math, the mathy part of evolution, which I know you guys are gonna look forward to. So, see you next time.


This process has allowed me to see, you know, where I could go with my teaching, what might be other ways that I could deliver the material and still be effective. And I think the combination of methods will be a beneficial thing too. I think the advantage to developing a hybrid course that's most significant to me is the ability to document the best delivery mechanisms, the best content, and to be able to continue to evolve that over time as new things change without losing, you know, sort of the basic content that was already in the course. I think going into this process, understanding that it's not a replacement for what you do, it's not something that's going to take the place of the traditional classroom teaching delivery mode, but it is an opportunity to sort of say, how can we do things differently? There were a series of sessions mostly on Friday afternoons in the beginning weekly and then subsequently every other week, and the courses, you know, the actual sessions themselves were really productive. They were on one hand spoon feeding some sort of basic information, but it never felt really pedantic or sort of basic in its process and provided me with a lot of information and kept me moving toward a goal of completing what was a pretty arduous task with regards to the amount of information that we had to document and thinking that we had to do that went into the course development. And what I found very refreshing was that we got very different perspectives. We got experts in different areas relating to the hybrid course transformation. And the one underlying theme was everybody was positive towards the experience, so they brought different expertise, different suggestions, different resources, and they were in a very positive and helpful manner.  I had great experience with my instructional designer. When we started talking about implementation and tools and how do I do this and that, I found them to be a great resource and they did help us walk through the process. I think part of their value for me at least was that instructional designer kept us on track. What I found very interesting about the instructional design process and this project was the idea of really starting from the bare bones, really destroying what you had in a traditional classroom and saying let's start from ground zero and rebuild it in a way that's very strong, very structured and very in line with the method of delivery. I learned a lot in terms of the process itself, the design of a course, stressing course goals and objectives and then really narrowing it down to assessments and deliverables. So my entire experience has been a positive experience. I've learned quite a bit and I think I can transfer some of this knowledge from the course design aspects over to my other courses. I think hybrid classes are good and I think there's components that I could use in even the classroom where I'm in the classroom because I think if there's like material that's basic and core and their applications are what you really want to use with the students, I think you could have that online lecture that they do outside the classroom so that you can really focus in the classroom on the application, the real world, you know the process of thinking and strategy. I see it as a great opportunity to spend some time developing tools and developing resources that the traditional students typically wouldn't have access to. I think the course actually stands to be improved dramatically which is a bit of a surprise for me compared to my thoughts going in. I think my initial expectations were that there was a great opportunity for the course content and the value of the course to be diminished, not increased, particularly in some of the delivery components or aspects of the course. But after really experiencing this there's a few primary areas where I feel like the course could actually stands to be strengthened pretty significantly. If you're interested in going through this course transformation it really should be going in with this idea that it really gives you a chance to take a step back, look at your course, find an appropriate way to deliver it, really reassess what you're doing in the classroom and finding a better way to communicate that information to the students. I think you have to go in with your eyes open that it is a major investment of time and effort but it is valuable time and effort in my opinion. I feel like it's going to improve my teaching in the classroom and ultimately on this hybrid mode.


The paper discusses the importance of cross-cultural adaptation of research instruments before they are used in new settings. The process involves investigating conceptual and item equivalents, conducting forward and back translations, protesting, and adjusting accordingly. The example given is an attitudinal instrument that was adapted from Australian English to Norwegian for a study in 2007. The original scale failed confirmatory analysis, but a new two-factor scale was identified and found valid in the new setting. The paper emphasises the importance of ensuring that concepts within an instrument are equal between the original and target language, time, and context. If the described stages in the cross-cultural adaptation process had been omitted, the findings would have been misleading, even if presented with apparent precision. This article was authored by Capelhorn John R.M., Gearsing Lynn, and Claeson Thomas. We are article.tv, links in the description below.