The Korean War never ended. No treaty has ever been signed, and the ongoing armistice of 1953 holds only a tenuous peace. And finding a lasting peace might just be the toughest nut to crack in all of international relations, because too many interests intersect on an all-too-heavily armed peninsula. Indeed, the Korean stalemate doesn't look like it will end anytime soon, if ever. That's the best realistic scenario, because if the stalemate somehow ends and war breaks out again, American and South Korean leaders face a daunting problem. North Korea is almost impossible to invade. Here's why. First of all, invading North Korea would be a game that involves playing with nuclear fire, because the country now has enough fissile material for an estimated 20 to 60 warheads. According to the Congressional Research Service, the North Koreans have the means of delivering those payloads onto targets all over the world, too. North Korea now has a diverse array of ballistic missiles in its arsenal. In late March 2023, the North Koreans purportedly successfully tested their Huizong-17 ICBM. The object reached an altitude of about 3,850 miles, over a 684-mile arc. If this object were to fly on a traditional ballistic missile arc, it would have a range of over 9,320 miles, making it capable of hitting any target in the continental United States. The Huizong-17 may potentially be able to carry more than one warhead, too. North Korea also has the 6,460-mile Huizong-14 and 877-mile Huizong-15, giving it the ability to reach most targets in the United States, even if the Huizong-17 doesn't work. It is still controversial. And there lies the first problem in invading North Korea. In the past, strategic retaliation by the North Koreans would have been impossible. Now, they can deliver at least several city-busting nuclear warheads with yields of up to 140 kilotons, which are seven times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. Any invasion of North Korea would now almost certainly prompt a nuclear response from the Kim regime. It could be directed at the American homeland, against bases in Japan or Guam or elsewhere. With nuclear deterrence now in place, an invasion of North Korea is pretty much out of the question. However, even without nuclear weapons, North Korea possesses another form of deterrence. The country has about 6,000 conventional artillery systems aimed directly at Seoul, the South Korean capital. Should the North Koreans choose to unleash a full-scale bombardment on Seoul, the Rand Corporation estimates that 200,000 people could die in the first hour alone. An invasion of North Korea would need to rapidly neutralize these artillery systems at targets all along the border to prevent civilian casualties the likes of which the modern world has never seen. Although American and South Korean intelligence undoubtedly knows where some of these systems are positioned, it's impossible to take all of them out in time to prevent significant loss of civilian life. North Korea has another ace up its sleeve when it comes to making invasion impossible. It's alliance with the Chinese Communist Party. The North Korean regime depends on China's support for its continued existence. It is through trade with China that North Korea can get around the otherwise crippling economic sanctions imposed on the so-called Hermit Kingdom by the rest of the world. Without Chinese imports, North Korea would quickly descend into anarchy, as it would lack food, energy, and other essentials. However, the relationship between the two countries hasn't always been on the best of terms. Even so, the North has significant leverage over China, despite its economic disadvantage. China is not always enamored with the North Korean regime, but it needs the Kims to stay in power for two reasons. First, North Korea is one of China's only allies on the Pacific Basin. Eastwood, from Japan to Indonesia, is a string of American allies or nations friendly to the United States. Geopolitical observers call this area the first island chain. This string of islands effectively cuts China off from the Pacific and Indian oceans and threatens Chinese shipping. Having North Korea as a projection onto the sea helps China to prevent complete encirclement and to keep American or American-aligned military forces off its land border. The possibility of American soldiers being stationed on that land border was the reason China intervened in the Korean War in the first place. The second reason that China has a keen interest in keeping the Kims in power is because if North Korea were to become destabilized, it would be dealing with millions of refugees flooding its border and causing chaos in the Chinese homeland. These are two unacceptable scenarios for Beijing and as a result, any invasion scenario that involves North Korea will almost certainly see China get involved, just like it did in the Korean War. For all these reasons, the Kim regime rightly feels secure in its power over its hermit kingdom. The costs of mounting an invasion are simply too high in any realistic scenario. But what if, in a hypothetical scenario, it was necessary for the United States to lead another international coalition in a war on the Korean peninsula? Would it even be possible to invade North Korea? Any land assault would be harrowing. To mount a northward offensive, Allied forces would first need to pass through the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ at the border, the only available land route to invade the country.  The size of land mines span its 160-mile width. In addition to the mines, the North has built an electrified fence and countless watchtowers would make excellent sniping outposts and machine gun nests. Although these would be spotted and taken out by artillery or air power, they would nevertheless slow the Allied advance and cause significant casualties in the opening hours of the war. And then there are North Korean assets that aren't as easy to deal with. Intelligence has estimated that there are at least 800 fortified bunkers near the DMZ, with each one capable of sheltering between 1,500 and 2,000 soldiers. These would serve as excellent rallying points, and although they too would eventually be destroyed, doing so would take a long time and would give the North Koreans room to create more casualties and chaos. North Korea also has a large army, one of the largest armies in the world at about 1.2 million personnel as of 2020, and about 70 percent of its army is within 50 miles of the DMZ. 50 percent of its naval and air forces are within the same range. Not all of the people stationed at or near the DMZ are combat troops, but the North still boasts a huge amount of armed soldiers and platforms within a short and narrow range to concentrate firepower on any enemy invasion force. North Korea has also now created a formidable short and intermediate-range ballistic missile force, which it will bring to bear in the event of an invasion. Several of its missiles can reach ranges between 930 and 2,795 miles. Even if the North Koreans decide to use only conventional payloads, these missiles can do serious damage to American bases in the region from Japan all the way to Guam. North Korea has already displayed enough ballistic missiles in its military parades alone to potentially overwhelm American missile defense systems like the THAAD, while estimates of the North's total number of ballistic missiles are hard to come by, there are more than enough to cause significant damage to American bases throughout the Pacific, even if the attacks do not escalate to the nuclear level. These ballistic missiles would not only potentially wreak havoc on American and Allied forces on the Korean Peninsula, but threaten their supply lines coming from Japan and elsewhere. North Korea also likely has, or is developing, tactical nuclear weapons that do not rise to the level of city-destroying yields, but would cause mass casualties against enemy forces on a battlefield. The North would certainly use them against an invasion force. There is also no guarantee that an attack across the DMZ would ensure that the North Koreans remain on the defensive. Between 1974 and 2000, the South Korean Army found and sealed four North Korean tunnels that crossed the DMZ and stretched into the South's territory. There are likely more that have not been found, although attacks through such channels would not by themselves halt an invasion of North Korea. They have the potential to cause significant chaos in the rear ranks of American, South Korean, and other Allied forces, further stressing supply lines. In fact, North Korea has long had plans for an offensive into the South, should another war on the Peninsula break out. This one-blow, non-stop attack would likely use chemical weapons in addition to conventional firepower. Kim Jong-il, North Korea's previous dictator, declared in 1992 that a lightning offensive across the DMZ would be able to break all the way to Busan in three days in spite of the concentration of American and South Korean firepower and manpower along the border. While this declaration was typical of North Korean boasting and would be unlikely to succeed in its grand design, the point to take seriously is that the North Koreans have enough manpower and firepower of their own to attack toward the South and potentially would need to be taken seriously in an invasion scenario. The use of tactical nuclear weapons, which the North did not possess when Kim Jong-il made this statement in 1992, would increase the threat. Bypassing the hellish DMZ and attempting an amphibious and airborne assault behind it would theoretically be an option, especially because the United States Navy, assisted by the South Koreans, would quickly establish sea and air supremacy. If there is one saving grace in a war scenario with North Korea, it is that the North's air force is weak. Many of its planes are 1950s-era fighters like the MiG-17, 19, and 21. North Korea even still uses a hefty amount of propeller-driven planes. The best fighters in its fleet are the third-generation MiG-23 and fourth-generation MiG-29 and SU-25, but North Korea probably only has a couple of dozen of these in working order. Because of the technology gap, North Korea's air force would be overwhelmed, and it would only be a matter of time before the American, South Korean, and Allied air forces established air superiority. However, what the North Koreans lack in quality, they make up for in quantity. The North Koreans have hundreds of planes and only need to patrol a limited airspace. These planes could harass and delay the invasion, increasing the costs even as the North Korean air force inevitably gets decimated in the process upon encountering hostile aircraft and modern air defense systems. However, North Korea's aircraft would not be the only threat to Allied planes. North Korea has been testing surface-to-air missiles as fervently as it has tested ballistic missiles. First, there is the KN-06, a medium range system similar to Russia's S-300. A longer range system closer to Russia's S-400 was also tested in September 2021. These systems and North Korea's liberal amount of anti-aircraft artillery units would create significant casualties even against modern aircraft. If North Korea lacks a modern air force, it can make up for it to a certain extent with a far more modern air defense system. And North Korea's ballistic missiles potentially carrying tactical nuclear warheads, those would pose a big problem for amphibious assault scenario. The North Korean Army, the KPA, may be far less formidable than it appears on the parade grounds. Its soldiers are often not in top condition.  Disease and malnutrition are common among the Korean People's Army ranks. However, there are so many soldiers that they would still cause extremely heavy casualties. Meanwhile, the North Korean Air Force and Navy may be hopelessly out of date, but there are enough numbers and firepower to make any invasion of such a heavily fortified country a nightmare scenario even for a highly motivated attacker. On their own, the North Koreans would most likely lose a war on the peninsula against South Korea and the United States, but the price of victory would easily be combined military and civilian deaths in the millions. And that's not even mentioning the fact that North Korea would not be acting alone. So far in our actual invasion scenario, we have not talked about the force that China could and would use to multiply North Korea's advantages. Because as we said in the start of this video, no Korean War II scenario would pass by without China getting involved in some way. China's People's Liberation Army, the PLA troops, are unlikely to be in worse shape than their North Korean counterparts and would add a hefty amount of manpower to the already dense defenses in the North's territory. China's PLA is the world's largest army with almost 2.2 million soldiers on active duty, and China would have the luxury of being able to concentrate most of these forces in the Korean theater, while the United States worldwide military commitments would make America less able to do so. The prospect of further Russian aggression in Eastern Europe would alone make concentration in Korea a more difficult prospect to accomplish. China's Air Force has more modern planes than North Korea's, including the fifth-generation Chengdu J-20, and would make establishing air superiority more difficult. Additionally, China has thousands of intermediate-range ballistic missiles as part of its anti-access area denial strategy. China would almost certainly use some of its stockpile to attack American bases in Japan, Guam, and elsewhere in the region, adding even more to the bombardment their North Korean allies can already launch. And the closer you are to the Chinese mainland, the more accurate the missiles get, which would make an amphibious assault on North Korea from the west, such as that seen at Incheon in the Korean War, an almost impossible task, ensuring even further concentration of North Korean and Chinese forces along the DMZ and the Sea of Japan. The Chinese missile threat would also make the supply situation already tricky even more difficult. With the likely destruction of Seoul, the use of weapons of mass destruction, and the risk of escalation into a general war between the United States and China, we should be thankful that the stalemate on the Korean Peninsula continues. The North Korean regime is an affront to all of humanity, but unfortunately, the Kims have successfully entrenched themselves into an almost unassailable position where stalemate is the least bad among a litany of bad options, all of which make North Korea practically impossible to invade. But what do you think? Is North Korea really impenetrable, or is there a way it could successfully be invaded? Let us know in the comments, and don't forget to subscribe for more military analysis from Military Experts.


Guys, I'm Teri. I am a former barracks officer at Mass General Hospital. I'm 28, I live in Rich, and I feel old right now. So I just want to tell you a little bit about how I arrived in the current job that I have. So I graduated from UNH in 2009 with a degree in English journalism and a minor in Spanish, and I didn't know what I wanted to do or how I was going to do it after I graduated, so I was a host of several restaurants. For the summer and then I went through until January and then I moved to Boston and I got an internship at a consumer-based PR agency in Boston. I had a connection with a woman that I worked there, went to a high school with her sister. So I interned there for four months and then they hired me full-time. I worked there a little over a year and learned while I was there that that was not the right field for me. It's not that I didn't enjoy my experience there, but I just knew that this wasn't going to be an extended career for me. So I knew that I loved to write, I loved the news, I loved journalism, so I left Sir Coney Brown Company, which is the PR firm in Boston, and I got my master's at Emerson in print and multimedia journalism, and that's where I knew this is what I wanted to do. I loved storytelling. We learned a lot about video and photo and storytelling through different platforms. So before I finished at Emerson, I started working for Boston.com. I don't know if any of you are familiar with their community sites. It's called Nortel, and it's basically community reporting. So I covered, I'm from the North Shore of Boston, so I covered the North Shore for Boston.com, and at the same time I wrote for the print edition of the Globe, which was awesome. Every young reporter's dreams to see your name published in the Boston Globe, so that was really cool. So I worked for Boston.com for about nine months, and then I got laid off. This was when John Henry bought the Globe, and they changed a lot of things, and they decided they didn't need me anymore. So I stopped the writing for Boston.com, but continued to work as an independent contractor for the Globe. So I had articles published in the main Globe edition, and then I wrote more, and then I realized I needed health insurance, and wanted a consistent salary and benefits. So I started looking for a full-time job, and when I did that, I got a part-time job at Salem News, working as a cop reporter with the night shift. So I was commuting from South Boston to Beverly Mass every day, working until 11 and making no money. So I did that for three months, and then this position at MGH became available, and I applied, and I got it. So I've been there for two years, and it's an incredible place to work. It's the number one hospital in the nation, and you can even begin to imagine the number of interesting, fascinating things that happen at MGH. So is anyone, is everyone PR communication majors for the most part? Cool. Okay. Is anyone interested in PR and healthcare? Maybe? Exploring it. You've got sophomores, because if anyone, juniors, seniors, live it up. So our office is not just media relations. So we're called public affairs because we're a multi-faceted department. We basically do everything. Media-related, communication-related for the hospital. So we have 12 people in our department. It's a very small department in comparison to Max General as whole. And we service every department in the hospital. There are 75 departments in the hospital. And we also work with local, national, international media, print, radio, TV, novelists, documentarians. I mean, we work with a very, very broad scope of people. So there are four media officers. I'm one of the four. There's our media relations manager, the internal communications manager, a research writer. She writes all the press releases about new studies, new research, new clinical trials that are going on at the hospital. And there's the manager of the Paul S. Russell Museum and our graphic designer, and then our boss, who's the senior vice president of public affairs. So to give you a little perspective about MGH, there are 30,000 employees. It's huge. There's over 4,300 registered nurses, over 2,200 clinical staff, almost 2,300 researchers, scientists, and fellows, and then over 12,000 employees in other roles. So nutritional services, buildings and grounds. So as a PR professional, your goal is to get media coverage for your client, for your company, if you're working in-house. And for us, it's not difficult because MGH is massive and it has a very prestigious reputation in the country. So getting media coverage is not difficult, which makes our job easy, I guess, on that front, kind of. So our main responsibility is to tell the MGH story, and we do so in many ways. Our offices run kind of like a newsroom. So the major hospital departments are divided amongst the four media officers. So I cover media relations for neurology, neurosurgery, imaging and radiology, sports medicine, and orthopedics. And then my colleagues handle media relations for cardiology, women's health, urology, GI, psychiatry, and any other requests for, you get a lot of thyroid endocrine requests. Those don't fall under our major beats, we call them. So whoever gets the request handles it. So my job is basically to become immersed in these departments and build relationships with the chiefs of the departments, the clinical staff, physicians, nurses, anesthesiologists, anyone basically that I can or that's interested in media. I'm supposed to become buddies with them, which is cool because they're all very smart and very interesting. So I have to learn about what they do, what research they're working on, if they have any interesting patient stories, anything unique. And I have to mold those unique patient stories, new research into pitchable stories. Because M.G. is so large, a majority of our workload is incoming requests. So any time a reporter wants to speak to one of our experts, a physician, a nutritionist, a nurse, a researcher, anyone, they have to go through our office. So a big part of our job is facilitating those interviews. Sometimes if the doctor is comfortable enough, they can coordinate themselves. Sometimes it's easier to have the middle man out of the equation, but we facilitate these interviews for a number of reasons. We need to vet the request. We need to make sure that it isn't beneficial to the hospital, to the doctor to participate in an interview request. Is it controversial? Is it something that maybe we need to manage a little bit? And if the physician is going to speak to the reporter about a controversial issue, maybe they need some guidance about what to say, what they can, cannot say, things like that. Most local reporters are aware of this, but sometimes they'll go directly to the doctors and then the doctors will say, sorry to go through public affairs before I talk to you. So some of these incoming requests could be like when the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge first came about, it was huge. So reporters want to know, what's the latest in ALS research? Where is all this money from the Ice Bucket Challenge going? So I would coordinate interviews between the reporters and probably the chief of neurology because she's very vocal about ALS and ALS research and she's a big part of the research going on. So that's an example of an incoming request. Zika virus. I'm sure you guys have heard about it in the news. So we have one expert and a couple backup experts that are our go-tos for Zika. So we've been getting a lot of TV, radio, print requests from reporters to talk to someone about Zika. Enibola. That was crazy last year. We had, you know, there were a couple instances where we were getting, we were hearing about NGH receiving enibola patient and it was like pandemonium. It was crazy. So we had to do press conferences because we were getting so many incoming requests from every vocal TV station, every major newspaper in the area. So because we were getting so many requests, we couldn't answer them individually. We just said, okay, everyone come to NGH and we'll have a doctor talk about what's going on. So another part of our job is escorting reporters on campus. It's MG's policy that any time a reporter is at the hospital, they need to be with someone from public affairs. We have this policy in place for a number of reasons, but the biggest reason is for patient confidentiality and patient privacy. So and that's one of the most important things that I think is with this job is the patient. I mean, it's at a hospital, it's always going to be protecting the patient in terms of medialation, it's making sure the patient is comfortable doing an interview with a reporter for any given reason. So is it anyone familiar with HIPAA? I don't want to hear about it until I got to MGH. So HIPAA is and I still haven't remembered this health insurance portability and accountability act. So this law protects patient privacy. So a patient, a photo of a patient, a video of a patient, medical information, anything on a patient's medical record, anything that identifies the patient cannot be released on social media to the public in any way without their consent. So when we have a patient that's being interviewed, for example, going back to the ALS ice hockey challenge, if an ALS patient at MGH is being interviewed, they need to sign a consent form. So that's they really, we have a two-day orientation when we start and they really emphasize the importance of patient confidentiality. So sometimes we'll have reporters that call if there's a big car accident in Boston or in the area and it is of interest to the local media. Usually they're brought to MGH just because of its central location in Boston and its size. So, you know, if the patient is brought to MGH, reporters will call us and they'll say, can we have any information about this patient? We cannot provide any information unless that patient has given the go ahead for us to do so. So, so getting into that, being reactive to anything that's going on in the news that has to do with MGH or raking news, car accidents, Pzika virus, Ebola, things like that. If we're getting a lot of calls, we have to be able to react to those calls, which gets, which gets intense. And, you know, sometimes we'll have celebrities or high-profile people being treated at MGH. So that's also, you know, a great interest to the public and to the, and to news outlets. So we manage incoming requests from reporters about that, too. The other part of our job has to do with internal communications. So we have a newsletter that is produced and published out of our office. It's called Hotline, and it is published every Friday, and it's about, you know, anything going on at E1H. I'm sorry. MGH. So if there is a unique patient story in one of my beats in one of my departments, then I can write about it and it can be published in Hotline. If we have a special event going on at the hospital, then that can be published in Hotline. So we also get to do writing, which is great. Videos. So we're really beefing up the video, the public affairs video. So we have a small camera and a tripod. And we try to accommodate any video requests that come from departments. So if they have an event going on and they want it filmed, we'll film that. We'll edit it. And usually all the videos will go on the MGH YouTube channel. But sometimes departments want a really polished video that we unfortunately can't produce because we don't have the means. We don't have the equipment, the lighting, things like that. So we do pretty basic videos. We have bi-monthly lectures at the museum during the week. So I film those lecture videos and they are posted online. That's basically it. That's basically what I do. Skills that I think are necessary for this field. Social media, definitely. Twitter, Facebook, we have various Facebook accounts. The corporate Facebook account is managed by marketing. But sometimes we'll send them stories so we coordinate posts also. And YouTube, definitely in Periscope I think, is something that we're going to start using if there's a press conference or event that maybe would be of interest to the public or to press and someone can't make it, then we'll try to have that available for people to use. I think basic video and video editing skills really come in handy. I don't think it is something that is required by many places. But I think it's definitely a way that you can stand out. No one else in my office knows how to use video. So I'm basically the only person that does it and I think that's a way, again, a way for you to stand out. If you don't, I mean I learned Final Cut Pro at Emerson and I learned how to use a camera at Emerson. So I have that training but you can learn online. I mean sometimes I forget how to do something on Final Cut Pro. If you just Google it, there are YouTube tutorials and they're really easy to follow. Advice. Start early with internships that are challenging because that's how and where you're going to learn. I did one internship this summer going into my junior year at UNH and I couldn't learn much. I was a very challenged. It was at a local magazine that was based out of Andover. It's a great magazine but I didn't do much. I was fact checking. I went to some photo shoots but I didn't feel challenged because I was nervous which I feel like maybe people your age are getting out there a lot sooner than people that graduated my year of college which is great and actually pretty jealous. You guys are going to be involved which I wrote for my college newspaper but again I didn't feel prepared when I left college. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't know. Didn't have many resources so definitely start early sophomore, junior year, do something that is going to be challenging and while you're doing it, if you're returning somewhere, make connections, get people's email addresses because down the road, never know. You can email them and they can be parking somewhere that you're in your plane for a job there. They would be really useful. Oh if you're scared to do something just do it. Get outside your comfort zone. This is the news and events page of the master on the website. This is managed by my office, not by me personally but we have news releases that are written by the science writer that I mentioned. She is a genius. I don't know how she takes these complicated studies that these people are doing at MGH and she turns it into plain English. I don't know how she does that. This is some media covers that we've gotten. This is something that's a big topic right now. This is not handled by me. This is handled by my colleague Mackenzie and Lesley, Dr. Leslie Kirsner works in the newborn unit. She works with a lot of babies that are born having been exposed to drugs so they go through withdrawals and it's very prevalent actually, unfortunately. I don't know if you guys have been seeing the opioid crisis in the news. That's something big going on. I'm sorry. I feel like I miss college maybe. That's a big thing that's going on right now so MGH has a big addiction recovery unit that is very, we have a couple positions that are vocal about change. They are contacted a lot to participate in media. Stories like this, cancer patient win stream wedding. This MGH patient was honored at the first women revolution soccer game, which is very cool. The marathon is coming up so my colleague who handles media relations for Mass General Hospital for Children, that has a team that's running an American. She's doing or working on getting a lot of coverage for the marathon. This is someone that is running the marathon for her son that died. I think he was a patient at MGHFC, hotline story. This is very cool. Another part of our job is crisis management. I was in here during the marathon, Boston Marathon bombings, but because of our location we got several victims of the marathon bombing. There was a lot of crisis control during that time, working around the clock and answering the phones ringing off the hook. We also have, which I did not mention, we are on call probably once every month, sometimes every other month. So every Tuesday you'll get a pager. Yes, a pager. Every single employee at MGH has a pager. It's kind of crazy. And you have a pager for seven days and anytime someone from the media wants to reach someone from the public affairs, wants to interview someone, if there's breaking news like the marathon bombings or the Ebola issue that was going on last year, then they will aid you at all hours of the night. Thanks. So getting back to the marathon bombing, Dr. David King is a trauma surgeon and he was, I believe he was running the marathon and then he ran from, I think, I don't know if he finished, either finished or he didn't, he ran from the route to MGH and just immediately started treating patients. So he went to a school in the North Bend to teach teachers how to factor against in case, you know, with all the old math shootings and things going on, it's important for teachers to learn how to do that. So we're here today to complete training at St. John's School to make this school the first hard-working consensus to comply with school in the country. It'll be the first school where every single teacher has had hands-on in-person training on temperature control and tourniquet application and where he successfully distributed those temperature control devices' training into every classroom in our school. Beginning of the day, Dr. David approached me as to how open we would be in learning this tournament and participating in the training for a tournament use and when he explained how this came about and the importance of this and the fact that many lives could have been saved not standing firm, we felt an obligation to participate in this training. I feel that we would be able to do this. Right now we're doing the training to make sure that we can properly apply during the crisis or any kind of, you know, after that we might have to, I think it's really great for teachers to be able to just have the skills especially because we're learning a lot about differentiating procedures as part of the lockdown rules, making sure that they understand, you know, if she's done it in the building, we are not familiar with the culture, that they know where the office is, you know, just to be more cautious and aware of it has some really good skills to have in order to, you know, prepare us for that to fit in more often as to any of our students. I'll change to this ball under our new appreciation of what a first responder is. Generally with regard to first responders as police and fire and EMS, but most of recent mass shootings has made us appreciate that we should probably redefine what that role is, what a first responder truly is. The fact is that at all of these mass shootings in mass gatherings including the Boston bombing, truly it is the first people to respond to the interview, a lot of bystanders, and as was the case during the Sandy County Tattoo, those first responders, truly the people on the scene first, were the teachers. Doing this project itself is its own body of research, but within this educational process we're also retesting people we educate throughout the year and determine how often lately people will be retraining their skills and trying to teach them the correct sequence of steps to go back to America and then teach them the pitfalls and the common errors that people make so they can consciously avoid them. Everyone has, and I think that I, everyone asked with a high degree of enthusiasm. So that garnered a good amount of local coverage. I think Channel 5 WCPD attended this class and they ran a story about that. So does anyone have any questions? Did your journalism experience help with this job? Yes, so thank you for bringing that up because I forgot to mention that. And I think it's extremely valuable to have journalism experience in public relations and media relations because you were on the other end of it. You were getting pitched by people at PR agencies and I know in my position what stories that reporters are going to want to cover, what stories they're not going to want to cover, what kind of be-roll they're going to need on their shoe, and that is very helpful. And you know the news cycles, so that is something that's very valuable, but there's someone in our office that has had no journalism experience. He's just worked in PR and he is a lean, mean, pitching machine. He writes an incredible pitch and he's really good talking to reporters and getting them to cover things going on at MGH. So for me, I think it's very helpful. Everyone else in our office I think has had a journalism experience. So it's definitely, you need to know you need to know what a good news story is, I think, to be in this role definitely. What were your personal kind of likes and dislikes about the difference between working in a PR department versus a PR firm? So what I didn't like about working in a firm is that you are at the mercy of your clients. So you could work really hard on something and depending on your client's personality, doesn't matter how good whatever it was you were working on turned out. If they don't like it, if they don't like you, then it's a problem. So that was a lot of pressure and having to meet certain monthly goals or promise something and have to deliver on it, that was difficult for me. And again, a lot, a lot of pressure. Some people love it. It's cool you get to plan events and you get to meet different magazine editors and you make a lot of connections, but it just wasn't for me. So, and I don't think MGH, working in the public affairs offices, your traditional media relations job, because we have so many roles at the hospital, again, crisis management, internal communications, traditional media relations. So, and you're in the hospital, I've been in four brain surgeries with reporters. So that, I mean, that's, I just stood there. I wasn't doing anything. I wasn't going to abuse anyone, but I was in the OR, in a state of the art OR watching these genius neurosurgeons operate people with Parkinson's disease and change people's lives and being a part of that is awesome thing. So, kind of going off that, you ended up at Mass Journal Hospital, obviously. Like, did you test out all of the different fields? Like, did you test out entertainment? Did you test out lifestyle? Who are you? Did you test out all the different types where you knew that health was what you wanted to focus on? I didn't. I didn't know that I wanted to focus on health. I had, you know, I think medicine, generally speaking, is interesting, but it, I didn't come out of my job at the globe and say, I want to get a job at Mass Journal. I want to work in healthcare. I didn't know that, but I just, you know, the job description just kind of, you know, I checked everything up. Yeah, it stood out. And when I came in for my interviews, I clicked with everyone and I kind of just went from there. I have cards if anyone in the future ever has any questions, career advice, anything, always feel free to email me. Well, thank you very much.


Welcome to the skies over Colorado for April 2022. I am Steph, astronomer John Insworth for Cherrywood Observatory, volunteer at the Little Thompson Observatory in Berthad for Longmont Public Media. In the news our standard James Webb Telescope update. So it is doing great, still getting ready to start taking scientific images. They are cooling the instruments that need to operate at nearly absolute zero so we can see deep into the infrared part of the spectrum. The instruments are not cold then the telescope is basically making its own light source locally that would make it blind to the signal that we're trying to see back to the earlier times of the universe. So it's heading for negative 223 degrees Celsius that's negative 369.4 Fahrenheit so yeah it's pretty amazing it's only 12 degrees Fahrenheit above absolute zero. So the instrument question is called the mid infrared instrument and it is getting cooler and cooler and cooler. They are taking a look at the alignment of the mirrors. This is a test for an evaluation image and all the little lens shaped things around the picture here are distant galaxies. Speaking of distant galaxies using ground-based observatories, the Subaru Telescope, Vista Telescope, the UK infrared telescope, and the Spitzer Space Telescope, so one up in space. We have now a new record holder for the most distant we suspect galaxy. So this is a thousand two hundred hours of observing time. My goodness and is this red little guy right here? The reason it's red is because at that great distance the universe is expanding throughout all the universe and the light from that galaxy is being expanded as well as it travels more spaces appearing in the light path and so to our instruments our eyes when you make a wavelength longer you make a redder we call that red shift. This is expected or suspected to be 13.5 billion light years away and that it came into existence only 330 million years after the big bang. So it's pretty amazing and be the earliest supermassive black hole as well. So this is turned out to be a little fuzzy but taking a look from the present going back in time you have the big bang itself you have the time when the universe is so dense and hot that light could not travel and then you have the edge of the cosmic microwave background radiation where the universe did become transparent to light just like light getting out of the center of the Sun it takes a long time hundreds of thousands of years to make it out from the center to the surface and then it leaps free from what we say is the surface and gets to the earth in just eight and a half minutes. The truth is you can fly an airplane about 10% down the radius of the earth if you could stand the heat because that's about where one earth atmospheric pressure is found. So here it is there's the most distant galaxy confirmed to date and this one goes way back into this time period so we'll see if it is true. All right change of pace here we are looking at using astronomy to see the interior secret voids inside the pyramid so what they're gonna do is bring move on detectors and place them around the base of the pyramid and let cosmic rays slime into the Earth's atmosphere because they're doing that anyways and part of the scatter of particles that comes out of that, muons can penetrate through stone like this vastly better than x-rays can't go that far so they are going to slowly build up a high resolution picture of the interior structures kind of crazy. Big star parties a lot of stuff is coming back now so we have Pensacola, Florida a couple of them we got Tucson, Astronomy, Thessalonica, Texas star parties the big one in the end of April, bootleg, spring star party in the end of April as well. May Pensacola repeats with a couple more public observing times. Here's a extra 101 note this time is talking about the nature of light we use light a lot to see what the universe is doing because light can travel throughout the entire universe and get to our sensors and our eyes. Well there's a technical definition but let me break that down so light is a transverse which means it's got things that are right angles for each other electromagnetic wave that can be seen by the typical human eyes so it's actually a tiny slice of the sensors we'll see in just a moment but it's actually much longer much shorter wavelengths are all part of the electromagnetic spectrum like the light that we see so they can travel through a vacuum composed of waves well I am also particles because everything is subatomic is both particle and wave in nature these particles represent quantum of light or other electric magnetic radiation they have zero rest mass so there's two ways of making light come and come out of matter if something is greater than 800 Kelvin which is extremely cold it will give off electromagnetic radiation and also if an atom is has this electrons boosted to a higher orbital not going to get into that detail and then the electrons fall back down again you get luminescence and you see that in glow in the dark paint toys and compounds and also fireflies and things like that so it travels at the speed C which meters per second is 299792458 meters per second or 186,000 miles per second that is in a vacuum if you start putting air through other media like sorry light through the media like air or water glass it does slow down the skies above your back yard while we start and end this month also with a new moon just like last time so a blue new moon it's not really a thing April 9th is our first quarter April 16th for a full and third quarter is April 23rd and the evening there's not much to see Mercury is coming rapidly up out of the Sun as the month goes on so at first it's not really there mid month it's about an hour after sunset you can still see it and by the end of the month will be a little bit better than that at the middle of the month Uranus is also lonely southwest sorry and setting about an hour after sunset so here they are really low neither of them are very bright or easy to see so much of a show and at midnight we don't have anything up you're gonna see in a backyard telescope or with eyes or binoculars but everything is in the morning sky so we have Saturn rising about three hours before sunrise Mars about two and a half Venus about two hours and I've seen about one and a half and Jupiter about one hour should be one hour before sunrise who edits these things so here they are all because of the tilt of the ecliptic that the planets in the morning sky are all very low in the south southeastern sky so but they're down there and it's quite a show if you have a clear southeast horizon we start the month with the Sun rising at 645 a.m. going all the way back to 6 a.m. at the end of the month sunset backs from 724 to 753 we go from 12 hours roughly 40 minutes to an hour 10 minutes more light by the end of the month the Sun's altitude about the southern horizon at local noon gains 10 degrees things really change quickly in March and April our feature object this month going to take a look at a constellation that's just coming up towards the highest point in the sky so the zenith and the meridian at sunset this is called m44 the beehive cluster also known as known as Presipi which is Latin for manger it's an open cluster in the constellation of cancer one of the nearest star clusters to earth under dark skies you can actually see a small nebulous object is one of the naked eye so great with binoculars and fantastic with a telescope in low power so here is the right after sunset here's the southern point in the sky you go up and a little bit to the left is this dim y-shaped constellation it's ahead of the sickle of Leo the lion which is very obvious right in here near the junction of the y upside down y is the star cluster your Colorado observing challenge is going to be the Lyria meteor shower go sit out in a lawn chair in the night of the round April 21st and look towards the constellation of Lyra the liar this is rising the northeast sky after ten o'clock so you don't have to stay up till three in the morning like some meteor showers this is debris left over from the comet C 1861 G1 thatcher and the radiant point that all the little meteors seem to be coming away from is up here to the upper right of the constellation of Lyra and the bright star Vega it started me then some year along about this month everything is starting to come back on long-run astronaut local society in April 21st at 630 the visible broadband imager of the Daniel K. Inoki solar telescope this is by Friedrich Lordger they do have a observing night plan with Boulder County open space you need to register and I'll give you the location but it starts now at 715 little township observatory is reopening there doing public nights yet but you can make reservations and to go to the telescope and get a private talk about astronomy and topics like that asks and that can vaccinations are committed but not required as to spark tomorrow observatory is open Friday 30 Sunday Monday limited to 12 people see their site for guidelines northern Colorado Astronomical Society is sticking with video webcast doctor Angela Stickel double asteroid redirection test is the topic April 7th at 615 this planetarium is reopening April and it seems to be that they are just back to normal I don't see any restrictions on their site so maybe look closer than I did and see if you can see anything but I think you can go to enjoy it and their observatory evenings are open again April 1st 815 and 22nd from 8 to 10 check out Colorado edu slash SB and finally our historical missteps in astronomy in about 30 seconds we're gonna look at Percival Lowell and the canals on Mars so kind of began with Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli was director of the Milano Observatory and he drew pictures of canals on Mars now he called them canal a which properly means channels so he was not implying himself that these were artificial canals but Percival Lowell took it and ran with it 1893 to about 1908 he studied Mars a bunch made lots of drawings this is just a few sketches over here on the lower right he published three books of these Mars in 1895 Mars and its canals 1906 Mars as in a boat of life 1908 he came up with a whole story of a water star civilization that was desperately clinging to getting water from the polar caps down to where the cities were and like that so I think he also got excited about stuff happening on Venus as well but he really popularized this belief that Mars sustained intelligent life forms from this we get the war of the worlds both the original radio broadcast by Mercury theater and Orson Welles and movies and everything else from that Mariner for flew by Mars in 1965 and saw craters but no canals kind of putting the end to that they even thought that some of the big dark lava fields or vegetation because of the dust storms that come and go without the vegetation is going through seasonal changes there's a real picture of Mars today that is a big canyon it's much deeper than the Grand Canyon and would stretch completely across the United States from L.A. to New York if any of your additions and corrections like that contact me at genentsworthagmail.com this has been the skies over Colorado for April 2022 keep looking up


Language acquisition begins very early in the human lifespan. The ascent to adult level competence is a complex process that involves several more or less distinct stages leading from pre-speech sounds to full sentences. These stages have already been discussed in our e-lecture Language Acquisition 1. In this new e-lecture we will describe how the child masters the essential ingredients of his language. In particular we will discuss how the child develops the sound system of the language he or she is exposed to and then we will look at the acquisition of words, that is morphological development. We will outline some central principles of syntactic development and finally we will discuss some stages of the development of the mental lexicon. Let's look at phonological development first. Language development begins with the acquisition of the languages sound pattern. During the first year of life children achieve control of the speech organs, so control of the lungs and the vocal tract. And they develop a sensitivity to the phonetic distinction used in the target language to start out with the innate ability to hear virtually every phonetic contrast used by human languages. For example the difference between voiceless and voiced pairs such as bar versus par. Now with this ability they can later produce almost all sounds of human language, even sounds that play no or a minor role in their target language. Exposure to other language leads to the suppression of non-native speech sounds starting at around the age of 8 to 10 months when most infants show initial signs of word comprehension. So it is this age here. After a period of early vocalization, so this initial period such as crying and cooing, all young children go through a stage of babbling which lasts for about 6 to 9 months, fading out as the first words appear. By producing these speech-like sounds, infants practice their articulatory movements and learn to produce the prosody of their language. There are in fact two types of babbling, reduplicated and non-reduplicating babbling. Now reduplicated babbling examples would be something like bar, where the same syllable is repeated several times and non-reduplicated babbling would be examples of the type ba-da-ga or ba-do-ga and similar syllable combinations. Later on, young children simplify their language and they simplify the words that they produce with a general tendency to produce shorter strings. This simplification occurs in all languages. For example, as far as consonants are concerned, children often omit the final consonant. So instead of using the word ball or bal, they would use something like ba instead. So omission of final consonants or they reduce consonant clusters such as stop and would use something like top instead. As far as syllables are concerned, children often use elements such as mato instead of tomato. So this is a reduction of syllable complexity or they repeat syllables such as da-da and often they substitute more difficult sounds with easier ones. So instead of saying ship, they would say something like sip. So here we have a reduction of the onset of a syllable. Let us look at morphological development next. Morphological development consists of the acquisition of the relevant morphs plus the rules governing their use. That children indeed possess morphological rules has been demonstrated in a classical study in the 1950s which used the so-called wag procedure. Now here it is. The idea was quite simple. Children were instructed like this. Now this is a wag. That was the idea. And then what about this? Here is another one. So you have something like two and then all children answered of course wags. So without having been told that the plural involves the addition of a particular morpheme and here a particular morph they in the vast majority ended up in triggering the correct plural form. Another very important study dealt with the order of acquisition, the order of function words and inflectional morphemes and it has been shown that this is relatively constant across children. For example the present progressive appears first followed by spatial prepositions, by plurals, by possessives, determiners and the past tense in different forms. And this sequence, this order of acquisition was shown to be constant across many children. Let's look at syntactic development next. Now syntactic development starts out with a period of single word speech which may begin as early as 10 months of age. Shortly after the child begins to understand words. At first children's utterances are one word utterances and they do not show any structural properties. They are used to name objects in the environment. Later on during the one word stage children also use single words to articulate complex thoughts involving those objects. So in the one word utterance we have words such as spoon for example in the child's environment or of course words like daddy. And of course here the child already expresses first requests instrumental relationships even on the basis of one word. Around the age of 18 months the holofrastic or one word utterance phase glides gradually into a stage where the child has become aware that adding more words will improve communication and thus starts to produce two word utterances. Here are some examples. So things like want cookie or where daddy are typical examples of this two word utterance stage. At the age of around 20 to 24 months children begin to produce longer and longer utterances that show more complex syntactic patterns. At first these multiple word utterances lack grammatical inflections and function words. This kind of language is then often called telegraphic speech. Here are examples such as cat drink milk or man ride bus. So typical examples of this telegraphic speech phase. From this point onward language development proceeds at a rapid pace. Within only a few months children acquire inflectional morphology and function words. From the age of about two years and six months they produce full sentences of various types and increasing complexity. Before they turn four most children have figured out the salient grammatical patterns of their language. Now what about the semantic development? Well the lexicon as you know from other e-lectures in the field of psycholinguistics is central in human language processing. It provides language users with all the linguistic information they need about a word or to be precise a lexeme including its sound shaped word class valid syntactic contexts and meanings. The lexicon is also central in language acquisition. Words appear first in the acquisition process and knowledge of words provides the basis for the development of sound structure, word structure and syntax. Acquiring a lexicon is an amazing task. It has been estimated that in order to build up an adult size lexicon of about 70,000 entries children have to acquire new words at a rate of something like 10 words per day. Children utter their first recognizable word at around the age of one. The time course of word learning is commonly assumed to involve a vocabulary burst or word spurt roughly six months later. Now we couldn't cover all aspects of language acquisition even in the second e-lecture about language acquisition so there are a number of issues left. For example we will have to discuss what are the driving forces in language development. That is what sort of factors play a role in the acquisition of the child's mother tongue. And how do we know about the child's linguistic competence in other words? How do we collect data? What sort of experiments can we carry out with young children? And finally what are the main strategies involved in the language acquisition process? Well, these and some other issues constitute the backbone of our e-lecture Language Acquisition 3. See you then.


So, what are the characteristics of the correlation coefficient? Correlation is a numerical value that describes in mayors the three characteristics of the relationship between x and y variable. So, it is a numerical value which is denoted by r at ranges from 0 to 1. So, what it describes actually number one, the direction of the relationship. Correlation could be positive, correlation could be negative. Positive correlation means if one variable is increasing, the other is increasing as well. For example, if I am studying for more hours, my GPA will increase. So, if I am investing more time in studying, my GPA will increase, one is increasing, other is increasing, it is a positive correlation. So, same way if one is decreasing and other is decreasing, again it is a positive correlation. When the two variables are moving into the same direction. This is an example of the positive correlation. You can see that this is temperature in degrees and this is the amount of bare sold. So, of course this is from the Gravator book. So, we are, I hold slides, I am using your textbook which is Gravator which I showed you in the first lecture. So, all the examples I use in these lectures have been taken from Gravator. So, here you can see that if temperature is increasing, the consumption of beer is also increasing. So, here one is increasing. If this is 20, this is less. But if it is kind of 80 temperature, the amount is also increasing. So, this is called a positive correlation when one is increasing and other is also increasing. Here is an example of the negative correlation. Negative correlation means that if one variable is increasing, other is decreasing. As you can see that this is 20 and this is 60. On the continuum, if this variable is increasing, this is decreasing. If one is x is increasing and y is decreasing, this is an example of negative correlation. So, here is an example of a temperature increase and then amount of coffee sold. As the temperature is increasing, it means it is getting hot. So, the amount of coffee consumption is decreasing. So, that is an example of a negative correlation. When one variable increases, the other would decrease. You can look around yourself. The many examples of that if one is increasing. For example, smoking and health is a negative correlation. If you are smoking and you are increasing this variable, the amount or quantities increasing, the health will be going down. The second characteristic of the correlation is that the form of the relationship. The form of the relationship means the most common use of correlation is to make a straight line relationship. So, correlation could be in the Pearson correlation, we talk about linear correlation or it is a form of relationship that it is forming a line, either it is a negative or positive. Correlation could be curvy linear also. Curvy linear means that one is increasing and then it is going down. For example, if you take an example of age and running speed, when you are growing, your age is increasing, your running speed is increasing as well. But when at the point when you are 40 plus or 50 plus, the age is increasing, but now the running speed is decreasing. So, that is an example of curvy linear correlation where we have a negative and a positive. So, the second characteristic of the correlation is the form of the relationship, whether it is a linear or the non-linear. The third characteristic of the correlation is the strength or consistency of the relationship and that is the main thing correlation coefficient tells you all about. The correlation may is the consistency of the relationship. For a linear relationship, for example, the data points could fit perfectly on a straight line. Every time x increases by one point, the value of y also changes by the consistent and predictable amount in the same way. The strength or the magnitude of the relationship is also kind of characteristic that is defined by the correlation coefficient. However, relationship are usually not perfect. There are very few examples where we can have a perfect correlation. For example, in the salary and the months, there could be perfect correlation that for the first month, if the salary is 1 lakh rupees, then it will be, in the second month, you will have 2 lakhs, 3 lakhs, 4 lakhs and so on. So, here is the months and here is the salary. But there are many, very few examples where we can have a perfect relationship where if one variable is increasing with the one point, the y variable would also be increasing with the same magnitude or strength. Although there may be a tendency for the value of the y to increase whenever x increases, amount that y changes is not always the same. And occasionally, y decreases when x increases. So, there are many examples where x could increase and then could decrease also. So, there could be like this, like there is a low correlation, not necessarily every time x is increasing and y is also increasing, but sometimes maybe x is increasing, but y is decreasing. So, when there's a low correlation, it means that it's not consistently going in the same direction, but there is a scatteredness in the data. So, if you look at this, this is a perfect correlation, which is an ideal correlation, 1. So, if there's a perfect correlation, the magnitude or strength of relationship would be 1. Correlation ranges from 0 to 1. 0 means that there's no correlation between the two variables, which means that the variables are independent. They don't relate with each other. And 1 means that there's a perfect correlation that exactly with the same magnitude if x is increasing, y would also be increasing. So, this is the perfect correlation. As we go by, we could have a dot like this. It means this is a strong positive correlation because the dots tend to make a line. Again, if we just make them scattered, then it means there is a relationship, but there is a low correlation because there are few points that are moving in the same direction, but there's a scatteredness. So, we can get an idea about this strength of the relationship and magnitude of the relationship with this plot, which is called scattered diagram, which we talked about. Strength or consistency of relationship is measured by the numerical value of the correlation, which I just told you, it could be between 0 to 1. 0 means no correlation and 1 means perfect correlation. So, this is an example of the zero correlation. As you can see that the dots are just scattered and they are not forming any line. Like if the dots are like forming any direction or a line, we can say that there's a relationship, but in this example, there's a zero correlation because the dots are not tend to form any pattern or line. So, for a correlation of 0, the data points are scattered randomly with no clear trend or line. The range or the sign and the strength of the correlation are independent. For example, the relationship of 0.6 and the relationship of minus 0.6. So, the magnitude is the same or the strength of the relationship is the same regardless of the sign. So, negative sign means that there's a negative correlation, which means that if x variable is increasing, y is decreasing. But for the plus 0.6 value, it means that both variables are moving in the same direction. So, the sign and the magnitude are independent.  Similarly, correlation of 0.8 and minus 0.8 are equally consistent relationship. So, a sign negative or positive, means that it is telling you the direction. Otherwise, minus 0.8 or plus 0.8 means that correlation is very high, strong and strengthened. But the sign means that there's a positive and a negative correlation. One of the most common errors in interpreting the correlation is to assume that a correlation necessarily employs a cause and effect relationship. This is very important. To read in correlation, just pay maximum attention to this point that correlation doesn't mean causation. Correlation does not employ cause and effect relationship. For example, if we say that the strong positive correlation of smoking or health is still it does not mean that smoking is causing the bad health because we cannot claim causal relationship or causation until we do experimental study where we control all extraneous variables. Release of the movie and the road accidents. Two variables can have a strong relationship because they both are moving in a same direction but that will not employ that one is the cause of the other. But it is just saying that there is a relationship between the two. If you randomly look at things, although there may be a causal relationship between two variables, the simple existence of the correlation does not prove it. Even smoking or health may be because of smoking, until or unless we run experimental controlled study, we cannot claim a causal or cause and effect relationship. To establish a cause and effect relationship, it is necessary to conduct a true experiment in which one variable is manipulated by a researcher and other variables are rigorously controlled. If you want to find out the cause and effect in smoking or health, you have to control for all individual variables, environmental variables, lifestyle variables, genetical, other things and then after controlling all extraneous variables by running the lab experiment, you can conclude that there is a cause and effect relationship. A study shows a positive correlation between number of churches and number of primes in towns and cities. Again, it is reasonable that small towns could have few churches and then fewer crime rate. Rather because the real reason is that the town is small. So two things can relate very well. If you run the causal study, the size of the town was the real cause of the relationship. It is from zero to one, what is positive, what is negative, what is linear, what is non-linear relationship, does not employ a causation. It just tells us the relationship and doesn't employ that one is a cause and other is the effect.