are creative people, crazy, are geniuses, mentally ill, that is the topic of today's totally demented video by the deranged Sam Vaknin, author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism, revisited, a former visiting professor of psychology and currently on the faculty of CIAPS. So the first thing to realize is that people confuse, conflict, intelligence and creativity. IQ, intelligence quotient, which measures how far advanced you are analytically, cerebrally, how far advanced you are compared to your chronological age. So IQ is not the same as creativity. And the linkage between IQ and creativity is not clear at all, more than a hundred years after the first IQ test have been designed by Thurman and Maneson. So we're going to delve deep into the issue of mental illness as a much better predictor of creativity. Yes, you need to wrap your mind around this new concept. Mental illness is a harbinger of creativity. Not intelligence. So supergenesis, creative people are feared. They're feared, they're hated, they're ostracized, they're punished. This is because they bring change. People don't like change. People adore the status quo. People dread transformation, the unknown, the unpredictable. And so many geniuses and creative people try to somehow fit in, fit in with other people in order to not suffer the consequences. And so they are willing to clown themselves. Albert Einstein, Jordan Peterson, they're clowns.   Many geniuses and creative people play dumb. They conform to the biases, prejudices, ignorance and errors of the masses, essentially broadcasting, signaling, I'm one of you. I may be a rock superstar. I may be a famous painter. I may be a Nobel Prize winning scientist. I may be a groundbreaking philosopher, but ultimately I'm just like any one of you. I've been lucky or I don't know what I've worked hard, but I'm like one of you. In short, the message is you're all capable of becoming what I am. These are the strategies. You're all capable of becoming who I am. I'm sorry. These are the strategies that super geniuses and creative people use in order to fend off the hostility and the aggression of the great unwashed masses of humanity. Who are no better off than apes in most cases. Now, John Nash, who suffered from schizophrenia, was asked once, why do you believe that you were appointed by aliens to save the world? Now, John Nash was a Nobel, was one of the greatest mathematicians in history. One of the fathers of game theory and so on and so forth. So he was asked, but at the same time believed that he was the emissary of aliens here to save the errant human species. And he answered, because the ideas about supernatural things came to me the same way as did the mathematical solutions. So I took them seriously. And this is a very interesting indication of the affinity between mental illness and creativity. They both come from the same source and they are experienced the same way actually. We're going to delve into this much deeper a bit later. Aristotle believed that those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies towards melancholia, today known as depression. Seneca stated that no great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness. And he wrote this long before he met me. Socrates said that the poet has no invention in him until he has been inspired and out of his senses. And Zygmunt Freud regarded creative genius as a sure sign of neurosis. Much much later, Nancy Andreessen, chair of psychiatry at the University of Iowa commented on the connection between mild mania and creativity. She said that many eminent people in various fields have been manic depressives. I quote, a variety of artists, writers, statesmen, philosophers, and scientists have suffered from disorders of the mood. A century and a half prior to Andreessen, Lombrosel, a Jewish psychologist and so on, a forensic psychiatrist in today's terms, Lombrosel argued towards the end of the 90th century that genius and madness are closely connected. They are manifestations of an underlying degenerative neurological disorder. It was a hypothesis, of course. He couldn't prove it, although he has analyzed many skulls and many brains. What's the work being done today? What do we think today about the connection between genius, especially creative genius, and mental illness? In Berkeley, there's the Berkeley Institute for Personality Assessment and Research. They've administered the most powerful psychological test in existence, the MMPI, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. They administered this test, the MMPI, to creative people, especially people who are known as geniuses and people who have come up with breakthroughs and charted new paths in their own disciplines. They tested them with the MMPI. The MMPI contains scales of assessment, assessment of personality structure, assessment of a variety of mental health disorders, and so on and so forth. And the results were very striking, very surprising. So creative people, especially writers, creative writers, scored much higher than normal people, healthy people, on the scales for depression, mania, schizophrenia, paranoia, and anxiety, especially anxiety about health, erstwhile known as hypochondriasis. Another pattern in these studies emerged, where creative personalities took the EPQ or the ISENG personality questionnaire, and they scored higher on a scale for psychoticism. Now I've mentioned this in previous videos. Psychoticism is not psychosis. It's a common misconception, a mistake, especially among self-styled experts. Psychoticism is a tendency towards creativity that somehow compromises the perception of reality. And psychoticism in ISENG's model of personality, psychoticism is closely linked to creativity. So in modern creativity research, we distinguish creative potential from creative achievement or creative accomplishment. Creative potential is, as the phrase implies, the potential, the capacity, the ability to generate something new, something useful, something groundbreaking, some pioneering work. So this is creative potential. Creative achievement is the actual realization of this potential. Can you carry this potential forward and make it happen? Can you translate it to something? Can you manifest it in some way? So real-life accomplishments determine creative achievement, having made a scientific discovery, having written a novel, while potential remains potential. And recent research has shown that creative potential is dependent on IQ. It does reflect underlying intelligence. However, creative achievement is independent of IQ.  High IQ does not translate into success in the absence of other factors, other features, other traits. High IQ in itself is not enough. You need perseverance. You need agreeableness. You need industriousness. You need stability and self-regulation. You need humility. Look at me. You need a capacity for teamwork. You need to have minimal empathy and respect for other people, not contempt, hint, hint.  You need a social support network. And of course you need luck. Many geniuses are homeless or incarcerated and all but forgotten because all they have is a high IQ and all the rest is absent. And so they have a high creative potential and a very low creative accomplishment threshold. Now, creativity has to do with several features of mental illness. Number one, reality testing. Creative people perceive reality differently. It is no wonder that many autistic people, many people on the autism spectrum disorder, especially high functioning autistic people are also creative and they end up being famous writers or famous mathematicians or famous physicists or famous sculptors or famous. So, because creativity and reality don't go together. So, creativity is the ability to imagine an alternative reality, the ability to divorce yourself from the existing reality and plunge yourself into a reality that is only inside your mind, a paracosm, a fantasy and imagination. Narcissists are very creative, consequently, because they are very adept at fantasy defenses. They are very skilled at generating fantasies and then immersing themselves in the fantasy and confusing fantasy and reality. This is a precondition for creativity. When you couple this propensity for fantasy impaired reality testing, when you couple this with recklessness, a sense of fearless godlike immunity to the consequences of your actions, it actually leads to exploratory and entrepreneurial behavior. If you inhabit, if you reside in a reality of your own making, and if within this reality you believe yourself immune to the consequences of your choices and decisions and actions, then you would never be afraid to experiment with new things, to initiate new enterprises, new directions, to explore, to survey the field, to take risks. So, it is this abyss, this divide from reality that allows the creative person to embark on courses of action and trajectories that other people are leery of, afraid of, reluctant and avoid. An example of this is the savant phenomenon. There's a link between autism spectrum disorder and creativity. Savants are all people who suffer from one variant or another of autism, and they excel exceptionally in areas such as mathematics, memory, musical skills and so on. So there have been studies by Pring and others, which demonstrated that there is a connection between autism and excellence in creative fields. There's another study by Campbell and Wang that reported an increased incidence of creativity among siblings with autism spectrum disorder. So it's like an echo when one of the siblings is an autistic, one of the siblings suffers from autism and autism spectrum disorder. The other siblings are also likely to somehow be more creative. Choose, for example, a technical major. But the shocking thing is actually that there are no studies, no big body of studies, no corpus of learning regarding the connection between autism and creativity. One would have thought that this would be a major vector of studies in modern clinical psychology, and it's not. There's something in autism that predisposes the patient to be creative and even to be a genius and to excel. What is it? It seems that the fact that people with autism spectrum disorder, misperceive reality, misinterpret social and sexual cues, including body language, are somehow divorced from their environment and have to compensate by creating an internal environment, which is a full substitute to the external one, or almost full. It seems that this somehow triggers creative endeavours. The next thing is originality, novelty, difference. These are all hallmarks of creativity, synoptic connectivity, the ability to connect things which on the surface appear to be disconnected. The ability to put together by borrowing elements from a variety of fields, many disciplines, put them together and come up with a new insight, with a new discovery, with a new innovation. This synoptic ability, the ability to kind of fly above the terrain, spot the topography and put everything together in a way that has never been done before. This is a hallmark of creativity and this synoptic connectivity appears to be schizotypal or even psychotic. This is known as schizotypy. I have a video dedicated to schizotypy. I recommend that you watch it. There's something mentally ill here. There's something schizophrenic, if you wish. Indeed, creativity and psychoticism are linked in Isaac's work, as I mentioned, and although psychoticism is not psychosis, they're not one and the same, they're not the same thing, still it's an affinity to psychosis. It's kind of a second cousin of psychosis. Initially, there's a burst of observations and informations and ideas and thoughts, cognitions and even emotions that is supernova of these things and they're totally disorganized. They're totally chaotic and this is the schizotypy phase and the schizotypy phase is followed by a more organized phase. The schizotypy phase is what inspiration is about, intuition, even solving problems in dreams. These are all examples of schizotypy.  Very often they are forgotten, the minute they've emerged and then somehow out of this chaos order and structure begin to emerge. And this is of course chaos theory in mathematics, chaotic attractors. There's some elements in the schizotypy episode that around which everything coalesces, it's like the formation of galaxies in the early universe, around which everything coalesces. So the initial phase of originality and innovation or creating something, the initial phase is very much like a gas, a diffuse gas in the voids of the universe and deep space and then gravity begins to attract the gas molecules and they form galaxies. So this is the creative process but of course the initial phase, the phase of schizotypy is clinically psychotic or at the very least schizotypal. Somehow in the family of schizophrenia, it's mentally ill, it's a mental pathology, whichever way you want to look at it. Inspiration therefore is a form of mental illness, an attenuated form, a welcome form, a beneficial form but still definitely mental illness. Two-time Nobel laureate, Lydus Pauling said that the way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away. Let's wishful thinking of course. It's not a rational process. The bad ones are discarded, discarded intuitively and automatically. The good ones are chosen intuitively as Einstein has described repeatedly. But it's true that initially there's a flawed, a deluge, an avalanche that is schizotypal or that is characteristic of schizotypy and only then there's the introduction of structure and order and syllogism and logic and so on and so forth. Carxon and Kinney conducted a study and they suggested that psychologically healthy biological relatives of schizophronyx have unusually creative jobs or hobbies. So even the relatives of schizophronyx, exactly like the relatives of people with autism spectrum disorder, are more creative than usual. And these relatives show higher level of schizotypal personality traits in comparison to the general population. SAS, excuse me for the expression, suggested that creative achievement is more likely with one or two indicators of schizotypy than with none. We're beginning to see that schizotypy is intimately connected to creativity, even perhaps is a foundation of creativity, but it's also the foundation of schizophrenia. It's also the foundation of schizotypal personality disorder. So let's discuss schizotypy a bit. There's positive schizotypy and negative schizotypy. Positive schizotypy, this is a series of traits, unusual perceptual experiences, thin diaphanous mental boundaries between self and other. So it's a bit psychotic. The schizotypal person is not quite sure where he ends and the world begins. The boundaries are very porous and diffuse. There's impulsive, non-conformity, magical thinking and beliefs. And these are the positive aspects of schizotypy. So you can imagine the negative ones. The negative ones include cognitive disorganization, physical and social anhedonia, difficulty to experience pleasure from any kind of activity, social interactions. Where the majority finds all kinds of activities enjoyable, a person with schizotypy doesn't. And that's another reason why the person with schizotypy has to create a world where he or she can experience pleasure. Of the two types, the negative and the positive, Beyti and Fernheim found that the positive dimension of schizotypy consists of unusual experiences and impulsive non-conformity, but not the negative one, not the disorganization. The positive aspects were significantly correlated to creativity, especially to self-perception, rating oneself as creative and to the emergence of a creative personality. The more creative the person, the more difficulty that person has to suppress certain activities in the brain. Precuneous, for example. Precuneous is an area in the brain that is active even when you are not active. And so it's difficult to suppress the precuneous in creative people. But the same happens in schizophrenia. People with schizophrenia cannot suppress the precuneous. Whitfield and Gabriel found difficulties to deactivate the precuneous among schizophrenics and relatives of schizophrenics. So even as far as neuroscience, we are beginning to see similarities between creative people and schizophrenics. Next, creative people are capable of attention multitasking. They are able to divide their attention to slivers. And each sliver of attention is directed at another task. Some of these tasks are routine and irrelevant to the main creative core. Some of these tasks are conducive to and contribute to the creative endeavor. But the creative person is able to do many things at once and divide his attention among all these things. And because of this, he is able to create unexpected insights and synergies. So synoptic connectivity that I mentioned earlier, the ability to connect the apparently disparate, the apparently unrelated, the ability to put these things together and come up with a new insight or a new innovation or a new process or a new idea. The ability to do this has to do with the capacity to fragment attention and focus among multiple tasks without hindering the quality of performance. So performance is the same. Only the creative person can do many things simultaneously. And there's no diminishment in the level of attention. So this creativity is exactly the opposite of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder of ADHD and ADD. Exactly the opposite actually. There's heightened focus, heightened attention. So much attention and focus that they can easily be distributed among multiple self assignments or self tasks. Now, many talented, creative, skilled geniuses are very impatient. They're very grandiose. They hold other people in contempt. They're patronizing and condescending. This could be perceived as some kind of grandiose narcissism. But it's not 100% that. It's not 100% grandiosity.  He has to ignore other people.   They consume your attention. They make demands on your time. They abscond with your resources. And so other people are burdensome, annoyances and nuisances. And if you're not creative, if you're not a creative type, if you have a 9 to 5 job, if you're just jockeying, pushing papers around, you can afford to let other people to interact with other people. Regardless of how demanding they are, how high maintenance and how difficult, you still have a sufficient amount of free resources to deal with them. But if you are creative, definitely if you're a genius, you don't have time for any of this. You just don't have time for other people.  One scenario follows another. You don't have time for people. People are non-productive.  They're actually destructive. So it's a defense. This rejection of other people, holding them in contempt, grandiosity, extreme impatience, rudeness, these are defenses. Defenses intended to create a perimeter within which the creative person can work it in peace, a sanctuary where he can escape, the madding, madding crowd, madding and maddening crowd. So the value-added of interacting with people is between minimal to negative. The value-added of interacting with your own mind when you are a creative genius is infinite. So it's a rational decision to block out other people and the white noise they generate. However, at the same time, the creative person is typically labile and dysregulated. It is this lability and dysregulation that give rise to the chaotic schizotopy of inspiration. We're going to discuss this at length in a minute. Coupled with the lability and dysregulation, there's a proclivity, a tendency, predisposition for change. Change is the only fixed feature in the creative person's life. The creative person seeks to upend the status quo on a regular basis. So in a way, the routine of the creative person is what Schumpeter called creative destruction. And so change, the thrill that comes with change, the risk that is attendant upon transformation and innovation. This is the bread and butter of the creative person and also of the psychopath. While lability and dysregulation are common in borderline personality disorder and in creative people, thrill seeking and novelty seeking are common in psychopathy and also in creative people. So we're beginning to see that creative creativity, the ability to create, the potential to create and definitely accomplished creativity have something to do with cluster B, personality disorder, disorders. And this explains why so many people who are creative, geniuses, leaders, scientists, authors, sculptors, painters, artists, cinematographers, directors and so on, so many of them are narcissists and many of them are psychopaths. Because there is something common to creativity and genius and psychopathy and narcissism and borderline. All geniuses endure in ordinate hardships in life. The biographies of most geniuses are mind bogglingly, chaotic, itinerant, desultory and insane. But this only serves to test the resilience of the genius and enhance it. Geniuses are tough cookies. They survive the storm of life, literally unscathed in the vast majority of cases. I refer you to studies by Ludwig, which I will discuss in a few minutes. Ludwig studied the biographies of 1,000 geniuses and sifted through these biographies with a psychological strainer. He used a psychological lens to study these biographies. Now studies by Reuter, MaceLess, others, Cary, these studies indicate that there is also some genetic template involved. They discovered that the DRD2 and DRD4 genes, and their various shapes, the polymorphisms of these genes, the 5-HT2 and the NRG1 genes, they are all linked to both creativity and some forms of psychopathology. This seems to be the beginning of indications of some shared genetics. There's a shared vulnerability framework of creativity and psychopathology. Carson suggested it. There's some kind of genetic vulnerability or some other type of vulnerability that predisposes these characters to either become creative geniuses or on the contrary, mentally ill, severely mentally ill. The shared vulnerability model, by the way, Carson is the greatest proponent of it, but there are others. The shared vulnerability model implies that creativity and psychopathology have common genetically influenced factors, and these genes are expressed as either psychopathology or creativity, and this depends on the presence or absence of other protective factors such as high IQ, cognitive flexibility, good working memory, risk factors such as low IQ and working memory deficits and so on. So there is a basic vulnerability.  You could go that way or you could become a creative genius, and this depends largely on whether you have a high IQ and good memory and so on. Now, these studies are very rudimentary. They're very rudimentary and the shared vulnerability factors that have been recognized include novelty salience, neural hyperconnectivity, emotional ability, cognitive disinhibition and so on and so forth, but we are grappling for answers in the dark. These are very initial studies. For example, novelty salience, there's some connection between creativity and psychopathology when it comes to novelty. It's associated with motivation to explore new and distinct aspects of ideas or even new aspects of objects. It's something to do with the dopamine reward system. We know as much, but not much more than that. There's research by McCray, Reuter, Flaherty. This research demonstrated that novelty seeking is associated with creative personality, creative drive, but also addiction. There are other vulnerability attributes, emotional ability, neural hyperconnectivity. They've been connected to creativity, but also to mood disorders and schizophrenia. It's inescapable, inescapable.  And by the way, severe mental illnesses, not minor ones, but these associations are poorly understood at this stage. Subjects with cyclothermia, cyclothermia is a form of depression. In first degree relatives of people with manic depression, they had higher creativity scores than controls. Goodwin and Jameson, they studied biographical materials reported by people. And they found that bipolar disorder has afflicted many important and prominent creators. I mentioned Ludwig with this biographical study of 1,000 creative geniuses. And he found elevated rates of bipolar disorder in samples of these famous individuals. There were other studies by Anderson, which I mentioned also earlier, and she used structured diagnostic interviews. She tries to assess creative writers. In the University of Iowa, there's a very famous writer's workshop. And so she studied these people. She discovered that 43% met the criteria for bipolar spectrum disorders. 43% of these creative writers actually had bipolar disorder. This is a shocking number. Only 10% in the general population have this. So among creative writers, the propensity, the vulnerability to bipolar disorders is four and a half times higher than in the general population. And several studies suggest that creativity is likely among people with mild forms of bipolar disorder or family histories of bipolar disorder. But people with full blown bipolar 1 disorder are less creative, by the way. Anyhow, this raises a very interesting topic, a very interesting idea.  We call it mental illness, we label it, we stigmatize it, we demonize it. But maybe it's not mental illness at all. Maybe it's the vanguard of humanity. Maybe these are the pioneers who drag us kicking and screaming into the future. Maybe progress is dependent on these so-called mentally ill people. After all, in previous periods in history, mentally ill people became prophets and established religions. So maybe we're wrong by castigating them, casting them out, ignoring them, confining them. Maybe we're missing on a treasure. Maybe that's the hope of humanity, mentally ill people. And I'm going to try to show you that this is not a completely crazy or zany idea or proposition. There's a growing body of studies that demonstrates links between physical diseases and positive evolutionary advantages, positive adaptations. So what we used to consider as physical diseases are actually evolution's choice of life prolonging and reproduction enhancing adaptations. They're good. These medical diseases are good actually for the species, though they are not good for individuals. They're good for the species.  Consider, for example, Huntington's disease. In 2007, scholars in Tufts University published a study and they proposed a new hypothesis to explain the prevalence of Huntington's disease. And they suggested that the disease enhances your chances to reproduce. If you have Huntington's, you're more likely to have children and you're likely to have more children, a larger number of children. And this is true. Statistically, this is true. So up until 2007, the belief was that people with Huntington's disease are more promiscuous. And that's why they end up having more children. But this is not true because the typical onset of Huntington's disease is at age 44 or 45. And promiscuity occurs in the 50s and 60s when the patient is 50 or 60 years old and long after reproduction age. So it's nothing to do with promiscuity. People with Huntington's disease are healthier in childbearing years and they have more children than the general population. These are facts. Huntington's disease strengthens the immune system during the most fertile years, allowing people to produce more offspring, more children. Symptoms associated with Huntington's occur much later in life after the peak reproductive age. And so it seems that Huntington's predisposes people to reproduce much more. I'm going to quote from the study. Research has shown that individuals with Huntington's produce higher levels of cancer-suppressing P53. And we hypothesize that they may be able to reap the health benefits associated with a generally more vigilant immune system. These individuals also suffer from the negative impacts of heightened immune function. Is there more likely than those without Huntington's to suffer from autoimmune diseases later in life? So the disease Huntington's disease is the price that the individual pays in order to avoid cancer and similar diseases during the reproductive age. And to be able to have more children than typical, 40% more children by the way. Consider another disease, multiple sclerosis. Multiple sclerosis is considered a seriously bad disease. And yet the same genes that cause multiple sclerosis protect you from infections, especially zoonotic infections. Infections from animals. When the animal is a vector, one example is COVID-19, of course. They studied nomad tribes. And they discovered that a few of the multiple sclerosis risk variants are linked with partial resistance to diseases, infectious diseases, especially tuberculosis among these nomad tribes. And so we need to ask ourselves, mental illness is probably grounded partially in genetics. It has to do with brain abnormalities. But are these things necessarily bad? They're bad for the individuals, we know that. But are they bad for the species? Is mental illness not just another name for creativity?  Their fantasies, their delusions, their hallucinations. Their defense mechanisms, reframing, everything is so creative.  When the creativity is not socially sublimated, is not socially acceptable, we call it mental illness. When it is socially acceptable, we call it art, art of science. Dietrich identified four different types of creativity with corresponding brain activities. First there's the deliberate and cognitive type of creativity. It comes from sustained work in a given discipline. Example, Thomas Edison, yeah? Then there is deliberate and emotional creativity. There is a personal crisis leading to a realization about yourself and what bad choices and decisions you might have made that contributed to the problem. So there is a deliberate emotional creativity after a breakup, after losing a job, after going through a bankruptcy, a horrible friendship. And this kind of your creative juices get going. Then there is a spontaneous and cognitive type of creativity. There is a sudden realization about something which creates insight and innovation. Isaac Newton, discovery of gravity with a famous apocryphal, probably, apple. And so this is spontaneous and cognitive. And then there's spontaneous and emotional, the kind of creativity exhibited by great artists, musicians, produce great works of art within minutes. Mozart is an example.  Correlation is higher than what would have been expected randomly. So it's significant statistically. The Componential Model of Creativity says that you need four components to respond creatively to triggers and cues from the environment. Because ultimately we're all triggered by the environment. I refer you to my work on IPAM, the Intrapsychic Activation Model. It's all about the environment. But some people react to the environment one way and others react to it creatively. And there are four components needed for this. Three components are within the individual, knowledge, domain relevant skills, creative thinking, how you approach problems, your personality traits and so on, motivation and intrinsic passion or interest in the work. And there's one component outside the individual, the social environment in which the individual is embedded and working. Is it conducive? Does it encourage innovation, entrepreneurship, transformation, change, progress, or does it frown upon them and prefers consensus and status quo and tradition and routine? So the environment does influence creativity, of course. But it's the same way that the environment influences psychopathology. Again, we see the linkage, mental illness and creativity are triggered by the same elements in the environment. The rate and intensity of pathological symptoms appears to be higher among geniuses, creative geniuses. And highly creative geniuses, highly creative artists even, are about twice as likely to experience some kind of psychiatric disorder compared to non-creative individuals. There are studies about this. Depression is the most common problem faced by creative individuals along with correlates of alcoholism and suicide and so on. Luck makes it suggested that on average, the more eminent the creator, the higher the expected rate and intensity of mental illness. The rate and intensity that you mentioned varies according to the specific domain of creativity, not only individual factors but which field, which discipline you are active in. So, for example, it's different for writers of fiction, writers of non-fiction and scientists. Studies suggest that almost 87% of famous poets experience some form of psychopathology compared to only 28% of eminent scientists. And that scientists are much closer to the general population than, for example, poets or authors of fiction or so on and so forth. The family lines that produce the most prominent creative geniuses also tend to be characterized by a higher rate and intensity of psychopathological symptoms. So it runs in families. Creativity and psychopathology run in families. The Bach family, for example. And by the way, families of politicians. So depression, alcoholism, suicide, anxiety, mood disorder, these are common psychopathological problems faced by creative people. The evidence points that creativity and mental illness runs in the same family lines, as I mentioned. And this is supported by what we know in psychology as historiometric research. Now, highly creative individuals have a tendency to show elevated scores on some psychopathological symptoms, as I mentioned. But their scores are rarely so high as to represent a clear-cut diagnosis. So they are what is known as subclinical. You know the famous dark triad personality? Everyone in his dog, self-styled experts online, tell you that dark triad is narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. It's not. Dark triad is subclinical narcissism. Subclinical psychology. Narcissism and psychopathy that cannot be diagnosed. They're not sufficiently high to be diagnosed. And so it's the same with creative people. I would even venture to suggest that creative people should be designated a dark personality.  And yet they cannot be diagnosed because their scores are not high enough. So they are subclinical. Creativity may just be another type of dark personality, actually. Now, creative people, we've just said, are somewhere between normal and abnormal. And this is a great definition of a dark personality. They score high on many other characteristics. And this is the mitigating factor. Creative people may be, may harbor, may incorporate features of psychopathology, but at the same time they have other traits that ameliorate and reduce the impact of the psychopathological element or elements. So, for example, most creative people have very high level of what we call ego strength and self-sufficiency.  They can control their illness. They take advantage, for example, of bizarre thoughts, bizarre cognitions to create, rather than giving the bizarre thoughts control over them. They control the bizarre, chaotic thinking, not the other way. And psychometric research demonstrated that many creative geniuses lie on the same spectrum of psychopathological syndrome, but less severe. And they're able to use everything to their benefit. So, what about inhibition? I mentioned inhibition earlier. So, there's a link between creativity and latent inhibition. Carson pointed out that latent inhibition is a filtering mechanism to screen out irrelevant stimuli, as I mentioned before. Now, everyone has latent inhibition. Even animals have latent inhibition. Otherwise, we'll be flooded with information from the environment, it would be perceived as noise, and we'll be paralyzed. We actually filter out 95% of all the information on data that emanates from the environment. That's why we need the unconsciousness, this huge repository of things denied, ignored and repressed. And latent inhibition is intimately connected with the neurotransmitter, dopamine. Research also has demonstrated that low latent inhibition is associated with high creative achievement, creative personality, and originality of divergent thinking. It seems that latent inhibition makes a person creative, and the above networks are recruited to generate novel ideas.  It appears to be rude and condescending and patronizing and contemptuous, and often it is, but it's a defense.  Normal people with average latent inhibition concentrate only on a task at hand. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder people concentrate on all the irrelevant stimuli rather than the task at hand. And people who are creative artists with what we call low latent inhibition, they can concentrate on relevant and irrelevant tasks together and become more creative associating the two while blocking out the rest of the world. Okay, I gave you an overview, there's literature of course as well, in the description of the video. I gave you an overview of the connection between creative, creativity, genius definitely, and some mental health pathologies. And I would like you to consider the takeout from this video. Perhaps we should stop stigmatizing mental illness. In the absence of mental illness, we wouldn't have had anything we have today, not science, not art, not beauty, and not utility.


Hello and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I'm Kristen Burns, your host here at the Library Commission. Encompass Live is Library Commission's weekly online event. We cover anything NLC activities or library related activities that librarians in the state may be interested in. We do these sessions every Wednesday at 10 a.m. Central Time. It's a one-hour session on average and it is free so you can attend anything you want to. We do all sorts of different kind of things, your presentations, book reviews, web tours, Q&A sessions, maybe even mini-train sessions, whatever we think that may be of interest to those who go out there. Today we are doing our session today on computers. What to know before you buy. And Diane and Michael are here to talk about that so I'm going to hand it over to you guys to go ahead. All right. I'm busy. All right. Kristen's going to adjust the camera for us. I'm Michael Sowers of the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Commission. Ooh, Zoom. Wow. Zoom in. Everyone is totally not just now. I'm glad I wasn't looking. And I'll let Diane introduce herself real quick here. I'm Diane Wells. I work with it. I'm part of the computer team here at Library Commission. Great. We, a lot of people don't know that the Commission actually does have a webpage floating around out there of purchasing recommendations. And we revised it recently here, kind of last summer and into this winter here. And I just figured what we could do is we could talk about that. Diane? Thanks. Really out of my mind. Well, you know, we want to keep it loose. We have notes. Yes. Yes. We have notes. We're going to walk through it. There's the link on the last slide to the actual webpage if you haven't found that already. The PowerPoint slides that we'll be showing are literally almost the exact same text as what's on that webpage. So save yourself some ink. Don't bother putting out the PowerPoint slides. Put out the webpage when we're all done. And we're going to go through the recommendations. But I know Diane and I don't always agree on the exact recommendations. And there's all sorts of things to think of. Oh, yes. Yes. That's the plan. We're going to kind of just riff off of each other. Also, we want to take your questions. Well, hopefully we'll have some time at the end. But if we say something, you don't understand what the heck we're talking about. We haven't explained it well. Speak up. Either raise your hands and we'll call on you for audio or send it into the text chat. We do have the text chat window open. We will be looking at that as we're going through. I suppose the, I'm going to hand it over to Diane to kind of tell you what kinds of computers we're talking about here today. I guess basically what we're talking about here is just the kind of computers that you might find for, particularly for public access. The web page itself is designed to kind of give you an idea of just computer purchasing in general. And so that would perhaps include workstations for your staff. But I think probably our concentration will be more on public access and maybe perhaps helpful in purchasing something for yourself. But that's, you know, not our main, not our main point. I guess one of the reasons that I thought this, that I was, Michael and I have talked about this page, for example, off and on, ever since he discovered it as a matter of fact. And when we revised it last summer. And I will say that, you know, I think that people are really, I'm intimidated when I go to buy a new computer and I know that, you know, just personally I don't feel like I know enough. And I don't know what anybody really feels 100% comfortable that they're going to like get a really good deal and that they're going to like not have paid more than they should have paid for what they have and did they get what they really need? And so I think one of the first things to note is what do you want it for? You know, and even if you just say well I want a public access computer, that's all fine. What do you see people in your library wanting to do? What do you, do they primarily come in and do poor processing projects?  Do they want to, you know, log on to a game site and play games? Do they, do they want to, you know, use some kind of phone software? What is it that they want to do? What is it as a public library that is no doubt, I mean it's part of another organization, what are you able to allow them to do based on what your IT restrictions are? And that to me is a really hard area and that's a place where Michael and I have an enormous number of conversations because I've been in government with limited, you know, where IT is pretty well restricted and Michael's job is the newest, the brightest, the best and so we constantly are trying to negotiate that line between what can we do and legitimately justify it and what can we and so we understand that you too have that issue, you know, you may not be able to offer your patrons everything that they want to do, not saying that you should do your best to try but this will help you get the equipment to do what you can and so I guess those are the kinds of things that are important for me to just say up front because it is important to decide what it is you want to do. Alright, before we get into, start talking about specifications and things like that, I want to share one piece of advice that I have always given. I look at purchasing computers, what some people consider backwards but I've never had anybody come back to me and I wish you hadn't told me that. It's always going to be cheaper, better and faster a month from now and in fact I just bought a new desktop computer for a member of my household two nights ago and for about the same computer I bought for myself in October paid about half the price so you know as frustrating as that is we have to accept that. So what I always say is figure out what your budget is first, figure out how much you're willing to spend because you could spend three grand on a computer if you really want to but if you know you've only got 800 bucks already you have to start adjusting your specs to match that and you can get literally less than 48 hours ago bought a computer that would meet every single spec and more of what we're talking about today for under $500. So it can be done, you do not have to spend a lot of money. Alright, so let's go ahead here and start working us through this and we'll start with some desktop recommendations that we have and a lot of this will apply to laptops but we do have some slides about laptops where you want to focus on a couple of issues. Okay, the processor. We probably don't want to get into too much technical detail about how processors work. Thus the late to Tom's hardware. Yes. Those comparisons and his exclamation is going to be at least as good as anything we can do because that is a great website for a computer. Mostly the couple of key phrases you want to be taking a look at right now is you have what's called dual core and quad core and this basically has to do with the number of CPUs on the central chip. I've been buying quad core. Dual core is perfectly fine mainly because most software today won't take advantage of the fact that you have basically four computers under the hood on that central chip. But future proofing maybe if you can budget get a quad core you might be able to get a little more longevity out of your computer. Then also you want to talk about you want to look at the processor speed and what we've recommended here is 2.4 gigahertz or higher. Or higher is going to be pretty easy these days. Or higher is going to be easy these days and if you want to go a little lower that's fine too. The computer I just bought is 2.2 gigahertz. Really is you want at least two point something I would say and to be honest to get into a three point something you just jumped $1,000. We haven't found that yet. You haven't found that yet? We've found that. Crisis may have changed and the other thing is because you're purchasing as a private citizen that's a totally different thing than having to purchase an option as a government entity. That's the other thing to know is that if you're willing to purchase online from manufacturer local and county and state federal government have special programs that they have in line with major computer manufacturers and you can find out about those from your city purchasing department I would think and be able to compare prices. Sometimes the problem with that is that there are limited we can almost always go and get something that is what we need for less than the consumer market but it won't have the longevity it won't have whatever we need to get some warranty options and some other things going through the government purchasing part of life of a particular manufacturer or a particular vendor may also have that and so we haven't really found that we're having a thousand dollars to get up above three because with the packages that are offered on the government side sometimes that's just the package that you have. Granted. Just so you know that. I'm not used to the government purchasing. Exactly. Yeah, I know. I'd like to thank you for talking to us. Okay, the operating system at this point you're buying Vista. I'm going to go out on the limb here we're going to see what Diane thinks but there are computers you can buy where it downgrades to XP. Okay, Vista's been out for well over two years now do not downgrade to XP buy Vista on less I'm going to throw this in if for example your integrated library system your vendor says we will not work on Vista. Okay, that's an issue that is mission critical software. Yeah, and so the package is dependent on that. But your public access machines at this point Windows Vista now there are about seven different versions of Vista we honestly recommend Windows Vista business even though home premium if you're going to go home computer home premium will completely do the job home basic is horrible but Vista has some benefit excuse me Vista business has some benefits and the networking environment in the library you want the business now then we also say here or ultimate addition which is almost which is all those things and a little more and my recommendation is this if it comes with ultimate don't complain but don't spend any extra money for ultimate you're not going to get any benefit out of ultimate that you will even notice ultimate kind of failed miserably with what they were going to offer I bought ultimate I'm talking from experience here I paid the premium for ultimate and I got nothing out of it so it's not worth it the other issue which I did add to our slide here is there is actually what's called 32-bit Windows and there's 64-bit Windows oh boy I've been buying 64-bit Windows I think Krista just bought a computer with 64-bit Windows more and more computers are coming with 64-bit Windows the benefit comes to when you start dealing with memory which we'll talk about on the next slide again if your mission critical software will not run on 64-bit then that's a reason to stick with 32-bit and that's a question you definitely want to ask right and even if you're the software that you're intending to put on public app because mission chains which isn't mission critical in a business sort of way but certainly customer service might need it but you need to know that whether that software is going to run or not especially if you purchase software and you want to be able to load it load existing software on it now most 32-bit software will run perfectly fine on 64-bit what you want to look for is not something that says it will run on 64-bit you want to look for something that says it will not run on 64-bit it's kind of a backwards compatibility issue my home computer is 64-bit I have found one piece of software in the last six months that will not run on my 64-bit computer and that's actually the software for my Sony e-book so and I would have to say that Michael is a great test case for this because I'm sure his home computer has many more things on it than his work computer and we're constantly doing Michael's got a lot of stuff so I don't necessarily be nervous about this what's this 64-bit we'll explain why in just a sec here but check on that so is Vista business a 64-bit version of Windows well there's actually business 32-bit and there's business 64-bit so it's the same Vista but it has to do with how the underlining code is written basically and it will say right on the package or it will stay in the specifications 32-bit or 64-bit it doesn't say either way it's the 32-bit if it's the 64-bit it will say the 64-bit now why does that care well let's talk about RAM let's talk about our memory minimum 2 gigabytes of RAM you can't go below that sorry just things aren't going to run and you'll see offers out there and a lot of well you did see offers out there for last RAM and you know you get that 5-12 thing as common as those those are moving off the shelves you will see that but be sure you're able to get it to 2 gigabytes really 2 gig you're running Vista you need 2 gig now okay we didn't say 4 gigabyte is feasible it will cost you a little more but if you can get 4 gigabytes of RAM that's great more the better the more memory you have the more programs you can run at the same time without slowing the machine down this is the 64-bit comes into play and it just becomes a really I think I can explain this let's see if I can do this I've been practicing on people 32-bit version of Windows you can will only support up to 4 gigabytes of RAM okay but that's total RAM in your system when you talk about video cards let's talk about a little bit later today you have a video card that is 512 megabytes or half a gigabyte you can put 4 gigabytes of regular memory into your computer but it's going to have half a gigabyte on the video card and then it will only pay attention to the first 3 and a half on the main memory so it's so if you have a gigabyte of RAM on your video card it's only going to pay attention to 3 gigabytes of main memory on the computer that's the limitation of the 32-bit 64-bit Windows will support I believe up to 64 gigabytes of RAM yeah so if you want more than 4 gigabytes of RAM in your computer you have to have the 64-bit version of Windows so I've got the 64-bit version of Windows and I have 6 gigabytes of RAM in my computer so and I can crank that up higher if I ever want to how long are you planning to keep this computer? how long am I planning to play? uh I used to be on like a 4-year cycle I'm more like 5 now I see and that brings up what I think is a real lady in addition to what are you going to do with it how long do you think you're going to have to keep it because that goes to whether you do 32 or 64 because more and more applications are going to start requiring 64 more and more are going to start requiring more RAM it will always be more RAM it will always be faster speed as just as you've seen the size of the story to go from a floppy disk to terabytes that you can carry in your pocket that's the exponential speed at which these kinds of things are increasing as well so if you're investing in a computer that you know is going to have to last 5 years you're probably going to want to balance within the budget that you have to spend today what I need to do right now and what I what I might need to be able to do that for the next 5 years long term and so that's the balancing point where you really want to actually think this whole thing through before you start looking for the big deal right hard drive okay get at least 120 gigabits hard drive space and the more the better and I can't imagine that you would even find anything out there that prompted you less than that at this point actually new computers are usually starting at 320 if not 540 here's going to be the key now the difference maybe between home and staff and public the public in most cases are not going to be storing files on your computers therefore you don't need as much space on a home computer you're going to probably start storing video files and audio files and all that so you want the bigger hard drive photos exactly stuff that sucks up that space unbelievable I watch most of my TV downloading it off the internet I need space I need space to put all of those videos and I do it in high definition so 45 minutes of video is a gigabyte of space right off the top staff probably somewhere in between do you allow staff to put music on their computers and store photos there from work or do you not but yeah get the biggest hard drive you can and if you can get a smaller hard drive but increase the CPU speed for the public machines get the slightly smaller hard drive again public machines people aren't going to be storing data on the machines you just need space to install the software that you hack monitor honestly 17 inch or larger flat screen LCD monitor you almost can't get CRTs anymore and you don't want them I don't even know that there's any it used to be that there were some industries in which CRTs were preferred and I don't even think that exists anymore but in fact LCDs are in terms of comment to throw in I'm going to ask Diana question the comment to throw in is that the computer I just got for under $500 did not include a monitor that's because we already had a flat panel 15 inch LCD monitor to go with it you don't necessarily have to buy a new monitor with a new computer if you've got old CRTs and they do the job they will work with your new computer and you don't have to buy a new monitor do you have the right VGA is what you're going to have which I don't know that I think you can get a video card that still doesn't have one but no, VGA has not been replaced I was thinking about this this morning do you have an opinion over widescreen or standard 4x3 aspect ratio I do I really do, I really like the 4x3 but that's what I grew up with that's the size of my TV screen that's the size of the first computer screen that's the size of everything I'm used to working with and so that's what I have in my office I'm going to call it the opposite I like the widescreen no, a ton of people who think the widescreen is just the way to go and it's much it's much handier and a way to decide just to do this in general and the way that we try to help people here decide whether they need widescreen or regular is what you're going to do because is the primary thing that you're going to do on this computer with intensive or length intensive do you find yourself pulling the scroll bar to the left when you're doing a lot of your work if you do, widescreen is what you want to do but if you don't then then maybe the 4x3 ratio is fine for you and then again then you look at, well, maybe there's not a big preference so in that case what you do is you figure out which one's on sale now I watch a lot of video which is in widescreen so I wanted to fill the whole screen instead of the top of the black border don't like that level actually that's true if that's what I was going to do or anywhere, I would absolutely want a widescreen if I was going to do things that were that caused them to letterbox on it and on my widescreen I'm one of those weirdos that will take the Vista sidebar which is down to the right hand side of your screen and turn it on so it's always on top and then I still have a lot of my depth space so the widescreen gives me the ability to keep that and I have tools that run on it and things like that so really it's probably going to be a preference and if you've got certain types of desks we'll hold the widescreen monitor so you know if that's the issue that's the furniture so the video card itself basically on a public access machine if you're supporting Second Life then maybe this is an issue most public access machines are not doing high intensity gaming installing world of crap halo counter strike things like that yes, there you go so really in most cases for I'm going to go out on a limb here and say if you get what's called the intel on board video for your typical public access machine this is going to do you just fine you don't need a separate video card you're a home user you're starting to edit video by definition video or you're a gamer and you probably do want a good, solid video card check that we provided to the system requirements for Second Life video benchmark links, things like that I bought a $30 video card it did everything I needed it to do Chris is more of a gamer I know people who spend $500 on a video card so she didn't spend that much she says but she probably spent more than 30 I'm guessing you can get a good one for $100 it really doesn't matter Kevin is asking in the chat room what is Second Life Second Life is the online virtual world where you walk around as an avatar and you interact with other people you can find that at SecondLife.com but you can just kind of look that up here and a lot of universities and libraries are using it there are universities offering classes and distance education in Second Life that's something you want to consider offering access to don't want to go probably much further on that gets a little away from our topic here today alright sound speakers and or headphones as appropriate really you can't not have a sound on your public express workstations anymore people have to watch YouTube videos for classes people are communicating that way by the better way to go than speakers because it's just the noise factor and really if you're going to get headset with microphones because people are going to start using other things and there are websites that don't require you to install software to access the microphone and things like that now so really you've got to have the idea of going on these machines and to be honest whatever audio is built into your machine you don't buy separate audio cards anymore unless you're really doing you're an audio engineer which pretty much if they're doing audio engineering they probably have their own equipment that are using in the library removable media DVD read write really get the read write allow people to save stuff to relax DVDs DVD read writes will read and write CDs also I know of libraries I know of libraries that offer like CDs and DVDs for people to burn stuff to sell them for 50 cents or a buck a piece make a little money on the side and then I added this thing here have plenty of UXP ports on the front of the computer because people are going to be bringing in their flash drives that's exactly right and think about that's the other another thing with that too is to think about the placement of your computer and accessibility of those ports because I know here we have people prefer to have their computers on the floor that basically means they're taking themselves upside down on a regular basis about their flash drives and the accessibility of the flash drives also I have a computer at home that has a little door you have to raise fortunately to find out how to make that door disappear when you take the front plate off slide it all the way out and put it back in but those kinds of things I think that you've got to have four you've got to have two for sure and four makes a lot of sense all right media reader writer these are your storage cards from cameras and cell phones and things like that they come in about different styles and sizes and types more and more computers today are adding those slots right into the front of the computer where the floppy drive used to be and really if you can get one of those built into the machine then people can come in with their digital cameras and they can do whatever they want with them and I think that's if you're going to let them use flash drives let them use their media cards right the differences is just not insistent and I really think that it I think it's something that I really wanted to stress and make sure I added to this page because it really is an important service for people because a lot of people have cell phones and a small card reader is not really that expensive to buy but one that will do all the different formats that you might have in your phone camera and you're whatever thinking had when you're shopping yes you can say okay I'm only going to use this format I'm going to use the mini SD because I'm going to put it in a carrier and there's just this whole range of things that you're planning but who buys things that way almost nobody I mean almost nobody it's like my cell phone provider has a deal on this phone and my contract is up and I can get it for 15 bucks so I'm going to take that and then you find it uses this weird card and then you have a camera that you got a long time ago and it uses some weird card because let's see what was before SD there's some other there's SD there's mini SD there's micro SD there was one before SD yeah there was some sort of contact oh there it is yeah there it is I used duplex to save paper and now I can't find anything you know those kinds of things so if you can trade off with your patrons some other thing and get that optional mediator that does five or six different kinds of cards I think they'll really appreciate that if you have people who are you know who have come in to try to do photos or to be able to advertise that you can do that I think it probably is worth it and what she said five or six these things we usually have four or five different slots in them slots right but they'll say we read and write 56 different kinds of media you know because a lot of times it'll use the same slot but for a different manufacturer standard so just look for the bigger the number the better and really it'll just work at that point it's not worth a mint but it's worth making an effort to buy and they're really coming built in so and we had a comment come through the text chat that some monitors have USB ports on them now and yeah that's great I mean if you buy a monitor that's good too yeah even better okay keyboard and mouse it's going to come on the keyboard and mouse um yeah exactly you know sometimes I wish I could I think I have three or four extra keyboards in my house because I keep wanting to use my same keyboard but I moved from computer to computer really PS2 is kind of the older standard it's more of a a round plug in the back of computers most computers will still come with those plugs but most newer computers are almost I found a USB keyboard and mouse coming with a computer and not coming with not being USB it's almost always USB now some people will get a USB to PS2 adapters to save the USB port really at this point it's pretty much transparent one keyboard one mouse or to another I recommend sticking to the laser mice I'll throw that in because then the kids can't steal the balls out of the mice um really that's about it so they stay a lot cleaner it's just a lot easier to deal with that we've got it out there just mentioning that if you're dealing with mice or track balls or barcode readers if you're talking staff machines any of those things most of them are going to be USB at this point if you're buying new equipment is that USB pretty much is the standard for connecting all devices that's why it's called the universal serial bus if you're trying to reuse devices printer's USB if you're going to be reusing devices another thing you need to to be sure that you take note of whether or not these reusable devices are going to work on the computer that you're buying you may just find that there's not a computer out there that will allow you to do that and that will be sad and you will feel bad about the investment that you made in this this yada yada whatever thing but it's just time to say goodbye um there's no way to deal with it you know you just think some things do just kind of outdated and it's a sad fact of life when you know as Michael said he just spent half as much for the same thing he bought three months ago and um five months ago and it's um things just get they're out of date really fast and there's no way to say this is things just don't last forever anymore I bought it at about 15 years ago I bought it top of the line HP flatbed scanner and it works beautifully and I spent $1,500 on it I and it's what's called scuzzy oh my gosh I don't think it'll plug into my new computer anymore I have to move a car I don't even know if the card that it connected to inside my old computer will plug into my new computer so I'm running it on the computer just to keep that running and at this point you know it one day it's going to give up the ghost I have to put it still works that's the problem I bought last year is a printer cop beer scanner for like less than $100 yeah exactly so you know but anyway there's other issues why I like it but yeah go ahead networking um and this is network card actually most networking is built into the motherboard you don't actually buy a separate card anymore we are recommending what's known as gigabit ethernet which means a gigabit per second transfer rate um what it might come with is called a 10 slash 100 ethernet card it's just future future proofing at this point gigabit is better is faster is newer it will work with an older network it will work with forthcoming networks you know go with the 10 go with the 1000 so it could say like 10 100 1000 whatever that's got to be the 1000 that's the gigabit I'm mixed here I mean if it how okay let me ask Diane and this question if it came with a 10 100 card but you have to pay extra to go to gigabit how much would you be willing to pay I have no idea that is what I you know somebody specifically has that question we can probably find out you know kind of give a ballpark idea get enough people weighing in on that thing but I don't know I just I think it's kind of just we know that it makes a difference we you know and so you know if you're going to it depends on people who are doing across your network and it's always really difficult to anticipate you know small libraries that didn't have you know any kind of automation at all five years ago could not anticipate now that they have you know a couple of network computers so you know the the idea that you know it's just hard to anticipate and network traffic congestion is a problem and it makes people's work experience and their their computing experience for public access just in general the computing experience for really and so it seems worth it to me and I think that's why we made it it seems worth it to the whole computer team when we put this up as well these are recommendations they're not hard and fast rolls no if you manage if you have a great deal and there's something that's you know out there that's you know going to allow you to get great computers instead of one or you know two or something well you know perhaps and not very you know with people not doing a lot you know there's going to be a year situation where that's just a perfect with a good trade off and you know I'm trying to stream high definition video through my house so I won't kick any bit all right printers your choice is the three gender laser I am a firm believer that laser printers are better they're more cost effective they are going to last longer they tend not to break I have seen those things where you know if you think four bucks for a latte at Starbucks is a high price ink in an inkjet printer works out to a couple hundred bucks a gallon or something like that I mean this stuff is expensive that's why inkjet printers are basically given away for free with computers is because they're going to get you on the ink at home I have a laser printer I paid a hundred bucks for it it's a Dell laser printer I buy one cartridge 70 bucks now granted a public printer is going to get more use but honestly you're going to get I think a better deal in the long run out of investing in a good laser printer even if you want to go color the color prices have gone down and I would agree with that I think particularly in a public situation you don't want to be dealing with constantly having ink problems inkjet's are they're fragile they're loading the cartridges if you're doing one at home then you kind of learn the way that yours works and whatever but out in a public environment people are going to want to look the lid and shake the cart because that's what they do when they're busy and they don't want to bother you because it's just something silly knowing that you can do this from when they had one or when whatever so it seems to me that it has a great deal of I don't know it makes a lot of sense to invest in that color laser printer is more expensive they have come down so much that if you can do that it's probably a good thing and if you can't there are places that I mean do a pretty good job of refilling ink cartridges and so if that really is what you have if that's what you're going to do then investigate that and see who's got that business going in your area and whether it's cost effective and what reputation is among people who are using this service I'm noticing the time here so I would keep moving along here somebody who is concerned I would say Diane and I not having enough to say so let's talk about laptops real quick this is sort of the catch-all slide what do you want, weight, screen size, battery life I added there the higher number of cells the longer the battery life will be but it will also weigh more how does the keyboard feel how big is the keyboard you're getting these little netbooks now which costs about 400 bucks 100% of an abnormal keyboard so if you're a touch type this with big fat fingers those are not going to work you need a bag to carry it around in whenever somebody says I'm looking at a laptop the first question I ask them is why do you want a laptop and I don't think for public access PCs laptops for the solution, in the lab version I think desktops you don't want those things to move they are a little more fragile a little more touchy you can't just swap out the monitor if the monitor goes bad it's the whole thing but that doesn't mean you shouldn't get laptops for, you know, maybe staff if they need to be moving around things like that right lab yes laptops take the most space or maybe you want to be able your patrons to be able to move around the library and use the whole library whatever place that they have if it's comfortable for them to work in and we just gave them a bunch of library laptops you know, whatever area of the library they're used to the laptops will get to the library in the states because you don't have to have a designated desk or area that this is all you can do for the computer you can keep them behind your surf desk, check them out and then just use them as they need so they can go anywhere in the library so smaller size libraries can have a bank computer, public access computers that are laptops overall laptop, an equivalent laptop to a desktop will probably cost a little more oh yeah without a doubt in that case if you're really looking for you know, if this is for public access laptops do think about the thing that feels mysterious for public access laptops they're not going to be caring very far they're not, you know where the battery life is probably an important issue then although you may have checkout times where you know, if they're not being used back to back to back they'll be some recharge time so you know, it may not be the biggest issue in a public access laptop so then you might want to think about the screen size and the keyboard touch and feel the primary things because again your hard drive side is it's not that essential but burning a DVD that's a big deal now thing to two remember is that some of the little laptops now in that book kind of think they do not have an optical drive we do have a slide for that after the next one so we'll come back to that one watch 5 if you're talking laptops you're generally talking wireless internet access okay this is where we start talking numbers and letters again but you basically want to make sure that there's A which has gone by the wayside nobody uses A anymore and there's B which is kind of the slow and then there's G which is kind of the standard right now you want to make sure that your wifi supports B and G that is the standard you can't get any less than that there is now what's called wireless or 802.11n I am actually using N in my house so I have some experience with this N is faster N is a stronger signal and N will go is a further signal it will increase your range however it's still what's called a draft it hasn't been finalized so if you're one of those people that don't like to use beta software you might not want to consider going to wireless N at this point if you can get your laptop to support N and you don't offer N well you're kind of future proofing but your future proofing against something that still might change and here's the other thing I've learned kind of the hard way in my own house is if you go with wireless N all the equipment is from the same company so I have like all Belkin wireless equipment because some companies implement it slightly differently oh that's yeah so honestly unless you're like me and you want it avoid N at this point it's not final yet I guess that's my best recommendation just for three months now um as to drives um laptops my same recommendations really is with the desktops give it a dvd rw absolutely but you start getting really small the really light weight ones they're not going to have one of those optical drives at all so I added to this slide you might then want to consider getting a usb dvd drive so that if somebody does need to read the dvd on the laptop or write a dvd from the laptop you can check that out to them they can use it and then return it wow I would never recommend that I told you we did not plan this at all okay why would you not recommend that okay we have one of these we have one and so you're you know it just seems to me that if you're going to buy laptops for people to use they need to have the things that they're going to use okay for you know if you have people who use dvds who want to play them want to watch them privately using your equipment who want to burn them from resources that they're finding whatever to ask them to come back or to remember to ask for it or to keep track of the okay so you have three laptops one drive okay one of them has a drive and you have one drive or a lot of times they come you have to buy the external drive with the thing and so to keep track of it and did they both come back did they come back and get one I'm thinking wow let me clarify my position right off the top you want to build that is the preference okay that's totally the preference and for a public access machine definitely that's the option if you're looking for the staff thing if you want to get a little tiny staff computers of the reference people can wander around the building and do reference without standing at the reference desk yes but at some point you're going to need to install software off of a DVD then you know get the little netbook get the thing that doesn't have the drive I built in add the drive when you need it but especially for public access the better choice is going to be a built in drive I'll clarify what I'm saying there so that consider having a USB one is if you don't and you had a good reason for not getting it in the first place so we'll leave that there then odds and ends that are pretty much going to apply across the board support warranties you're on your own no I sometimes get the extended warranty I have had a situation where my laptop died I sent it back to Gateway two years after I bought it really fixed the whole thing and shipped it back to me and couldn't cost it then there's the times where you have a computer and nothing goes wrong ever with it that you can't fix yourself and you wasted $300 on the extended warranty it's how comfortable are you fixing it are you you know do you like the extended warranties is it on the laptops I'm telling you though sometimes that 100% replacement even if you drop the darn thing in a broken half they will replace it can be worth it if you're checking out laptops to the public it's really going to be your call on this one and I can say again this is the place where working through your government entity may help you some because the warranties tend to they're packaged a little bit differently for city-state government kind of thing so sometimes that may make the big difference over what just the consumer warranty is I think it's a hard call again it's like how long do you expect it to tap to last what's going to be going on with it how far is it moving what kind of stability is the furniture that it's on there are a ton of things you have to look at your own environment and make a decision about whether that money is going to be well spent or not it's a tough one just a couple more slides here to point you out and I will admit there is more detail about some of this stuff on the actual web page which I believe is linked on our last slide software you can get discounted software through the basket department of education through soft choice and through TechSoup you can get Microsoft Office for like 20 bucks through TechSoup you've got to check these out if you've never looked at these websites TechSoup is public library specifics I don't know if we've got any academics or specials in the audience but I'm telling you if you've never looked at TechSoup you can get the most amazing software for like a processing fee of $12 I mean it's unreal the deals you can get through these circuits that is true however one of the things about TechSoup is that there's I will find and find a way to get to you the link to the webinar that TechSoup did a couple like last month I believe and when they really describe what their software program is about for public libraries it's really helpful because there are caveats to the whole thing you can get it, you can buy this many things over to your period and then you can it's a finesse thing some restrictions may apply just like the details that's exactly the thing it was very informative it was really interesting to listen to the audio about that how about we put the link to that webinar recording on the web page the web page we will add it to that web page and you can get to it from there additional restart here is the link to that recommendation web page we've been talking about I recommend that HTML that are on our website we've also linked to a computer maintenance and security checklist and another computer maintenance checklist so some just additional things for kind of long term playing around oh my gosh we've got four minutes we have to say this we have to say this we've got only 49 minutes to the session we've got about five after I need to say that one of the things that I think is really important is in addition to looking at the kind of hardware deal that you can get for the money that you have including you know whatever stuff or whatever before you actually purchase something you have a plan for what you're going to do about virus protection what you're going to do for spyware what are you going to do about backups if you're working with if you're working with actual staff computers I think that it didn't just describe another session but it just it really is something that I think is really important because the problem is once you have it on the desks it can't not use it you're going to hook it up you're going to go on the internet and are you ready are you ready do you have updates do you have automatic updates turned on so follow your software path just will be automatic do you have do you have a backup plan so that when when you have that catastrophic failure when whatever those files are somewhere else they're not just sitting on a single hard drive on a machine you know that you have a plan you know where the stuff is and that you know how to get to it and it's regular these two checklists that are listed here both talk about that in some way you go to Microsoft and search on and security and maintenance they have a page that has various links and I'm sure it's heavy I'm using Microsoft products and whatever but you still get good information out of that so I just didn't want us to stop without saying you know yeah it's great to have the thing on the desk to keep it working and to be sure that it's not out there not on that desk sending robot messages for you know someplace on another continent to everyone you know just random people you know it's just important and I do know that Diane and I agree on the concepts but on the implementation we do have some differences of opinion on how to do these things so I'm actually going to say a lot I think we need to do another session just on that and that would be a very interesting conversation sure I guess we've just promised give us a little time Chris has got the schedule probably at least a month or two but I think we can come back to that I think you and I can go for an hour without even thinking about it other people who do a lot more get six computer people in the room you'll get six different opinions and topics definitely okay it is eleven but we started five minutes late we still have five minutes are there any questions about what we talked about or maybe some other issues that we can maybe address that we haven't for you already if you want to do it via audio go ahead and click the raise your hand button or just go ahead and type it right into the text chat and we will see that we do have that open on our screen and we will be happy to attempt to address any of those issues it's exciting I know I did say something to type in in those chats we're not giving you a hard time we should put in the jeopardy music get that get that going through but I will throw up while we're seeing if there's any or last or contacts the information there give us a shout I've had several libraries in the last couple of months we got a bid on computers and sent me the bid and asked me what I thought of it and then sometimes I go to Diane and I'm like what are you thinking about this somebody else would do that and I've actually stunned them back and said look you really need another bid because this is way too much for what you're asking for I think that one was a server though I asked a few other people you know we will offer what help we can will I be able to print out additional resources information which information in particular the previous URLs those URLs are actually on this web page this one is really the key one everything that's on here that is URLs will be put into the library commission delicious account which will be linked off of the recording when this recording is put up on to our website this afternoon so all of these URLs will have been there you can click on them and yeah for all these pages to print off anything and everything that you want to so I'll have all these URLs collected from one place if you didn't catch it off of the slides here so that you have easy access to all of them any other questions what about my local computer store that gives me a good price but won't give me the original Microsoft disks ok my gut reaction is why the heck wouldn't they you don't get them hardly at all you only get restore software good point some computers now you get no physical media and then when you set up the computer you like to create your disks now or there are some other software package that you're supposed to run if that's what they're doing that's ok but if they're just installing office and not giving you the disks or not giving you a way to create disks I think that makes me nervous I don't know that much about it I would rather they should be giving you the key right and they should be giving you the key but how do you ever reinstall it if your computer completely dies if you don't have physical media yeah I would ask them some questions I would say would be non standard practice mainly because we're all really confused expression interface they have one set of disks and they install it on many computers um do you have your own license key then coming cause we do that here at the commission we buy a license for multiple computers but we're all in the same organization I don't think that a computer store can just do that there may be something we don't know about let's do it we can find out and try to get back where I place to put that information send us an email maybe with a little more detail to remind us to poke around into that but I gotta be honest I want physical media somehow I may have to burn it myself at some point well for example I bought I bought it off this 2007 and I installed it on a computer and then I got a new computer so I uninstalled it for the first one and wanted to install it on the second one so I'm still legal I've still only got to install on one computer but without physical media I couldn't have done that so yeah I want physical media well I don't know I'll have to send us an email we can poke around on that one alright anything else before we shut things down here let Christian take camera here okay as you got in on that oh we're getting some applause yay thank you as usual this hasn't been recorded it will be available I should have it this afternoon I think it's with all the URLs and everything you can contact of course Michael and Diana with any questions you do come up with in the future and answer here if there's nothing else urgent you know if you need anything then we are done thank you very much for attending thanks bye


Let's look at how you can analyse Act 5 Scene 1 when Lady Macbeth goes crazy. Lady Macbeth starts having hallucinations. She says, yet here's a spot and this declarative sentence shows that she's seeing things, she's going crazy.  Now these exclamatory sentences show that Lady Macbeth is really frantic at the hallucinations that she's seeing. She then says, why then? It is time to do it.   Now this declarative sentence shows that she realises she's not going to be forgiven by God for all her sins. She seems really regretful of killing King Duncan because she asks, yet who would have thought that old man to have so much blood in him? Now this is a rhetorical question basically remembering how much King Duncan bled. Her regret is even made more clear through the alliteration of age and have, had and him. Here we can see that she really regrets having killed King Duncan. That's what's true for crazy.


Welcome to part 4 of Make It Many, which is a series that reimagines trending recipes using lecressé's mini-cucottes. Next up's a take on the viral cowboy caviar, also known as Texas caviar, which is kind of an ode to pico de gallo, but with way more ingredients. This version cooks the beans in a jalapeno-infused oil, and the corn is roasted in a lime butter sauce. Like and follow for more.