additional territory shared between the Haudenosaunee confederacy and the Anishinaabe nations. And this territory is covered by the Upper Canada treaties and is within the lands protected by this dish with one spoon agreement. And it's directly adjacent to Haldeman Treaty Territory. So we acknowledge this because we acknowledge we have a debt to those who were here before us and we recognize our responsibility as guests to respect and honor the intimate relationship indigenous peoples have to this land. So I'm here to talk about, I was really, I loved Cyan's keynote yesterday about her travels to space and I was definitely one of the ones that put my hand up, I want to go to space. And I thought, oh, it's kind of, it's nicely tied to this project that I've been working on with a group of colleagues from other institutions in Ontario. And it is on beyond the exam and we kind of think of it as the final frontier when we're working especially in teaching and learning spaces and helping faculty adopt open pedagogies and alternative assessments that assessments really are something that often, often people even use open textbook and open materials, they still do a traditional exam and we'd like to change that a bit. So we had to, we decided to come up with this project and I'll talk a bit more about it now. So I'd like everyone to go back in time and maybe you have to go back in time a little bit more further back than others but to your own educational experience. So just think about that for a minute. What assessment did you learn the most from? So I'll give you a minute to think about it. Was it perhaps an exam? Was it an experiential opportunity? Was it a presentation that you had to prepare for a class? Was it an essay or paper that you wrote? Was it a project? Was it a portfolio or maybe it was other? So think about it for a minute and when you think about your experience of what you learned the most from an assessment, I'm going to ask for a, instead of a mentee or fancy schmancy way of getting your responses, just to raise your hand. So did anyone learn the most from writing an exam? No hands, okay. And that's probably the most frequent form of assessment. Did anyone learn the most from an experiential opportunity that was assessed? I see a few hands, a lot of people and maybe, I don't know what field you're in, but in health sciences and clinical placements might relate to that. Did anyone learn the most from doing a presentation in front of a group of peers? Yeah, that's me too. I find I learned the most from preparing. There's a lot of people in the room felt that. What about preparing a portfolio? There's a few hands, yeah. Yeah, and a lot of programs don't actually include that so maybe that's why we didn't all have that experience, but I think it's a great way to assess your learning, especially through the trajectory of a program. What about a large project? I wondered if that would be the most and I think it is, so that's a wonderful way of project-based learning of course is a great way to assess. And then other, maybe there's a category, any others that I didn't have on this slide that you maybe learned more from? I was hoping there'd be someone because then I'd ask you, there is, just keep that in your mind because at the end when the questions are, I'll ask you to share it. So as you can see, not many people learn very much from exams and that is the most traditional form of assessment, well, from my institution experience at least. So how we evolved this project was with the pandemic, we at McMaster and the institutions that I collaborated with, we all were faced with the realization or not realization or the unfortunate request that we had to obtain proctoring software, which many of us were opposed to and we know that there are many issues with proctoring software and some of them, but the basic issues are with technical issues, so it's not really, it doesn't really actually work, it's easily circumvented. Equity issues, more importantly, when students need to have access to robust internet, they need to be in a calm place, they are able to do an exam that's free of distractions, they need to have a robust computer and they need to also think about their own health and maybe they have an accommodation or a disability and the proctoring software just maybe gives an inappropriate red flag and then also having recognition of time and family responsibilities and particularly during a pandemic when everyone is already overwhelmed and having to do a proctored exam, we had discussions with many students who were just, it was really heart wrenching to hear of the experiences that they had with being flagged for inappropriately looking off in the distance like you do or maybe that was the color of their skin actually raised a red flag, which is really unfortunate and I think something that we should work really hard to not use proctoring software in education. So we did have to, we did get proctoring software anyways because some of the professional accreditation required an exam and so we couldn't tell the Canadian Medical Association for example that we can't have an exam, we're against it. So we had to use it in certain circumstances but when we talked to faculty we found that the biggest barrier to looking at alternative assessment was they just didn't have the support in looking in their courses and developing assessments so they needed instructions on how to integrate them into the class, they needed rubrics, they needed examples of the assessment that was being completed by other students and often we need, they also needed assistance with the technology if there was some technology integration so and we all, we realized that faculty were also similarly overwhelmed so they didn't have just learning to teach online for the first time was enough so they really needed that support with these type of inclusions, the instructions of rubrics, examples, etc. So we were really fortunate in Ontario to have eCampus Ontario which many of you may be familiar with if you know David Porter or Lena Patterson who often come to the OE Global, Lena is the chair, they had a virtual learning strategy funding that was available two years ago and we applied, they had a category digital fluency for educators, we had a collaboration, so McMaster University where I'm from, we worked with Brock University which is in near Niagara Falls Ontario and then College Boreal which is in northern, it's a Francophone institution in northern Ontario. So the three institutions applied, we received some funding and we were able to get the project going. We used the funding largely to pay students and conduct French translation. So we formed our development team, there was multiple people from each institution, we had faculty representation, teaching and learning staff and students as well. We connected either through real-time virtual meetings or through Microsoft teams and have developed the project. So when we first decided the outline of the project we knew that we had to have, we really wanted to build it around the exemplars and the kind of documents that instructors could, really requested that they needed for their courses and we used a lot of our student discussions to come up with the type of assignments that the students found most valuable. So we basically outlined the projects, having an introduction, some bank of exemplars and we built this in press books and we also have a WordPress landing page and again we did translate it into French. So that was also part of the budget. So let's take a look at it. So there's the website beyondtheexam.ca. This is our landing page, hopefully it goes up okay. There we are. So here we are landing in our beyond the exam and we have a little bit of information around what the toolkit is. There's the English version and the French version. So you can access either. But an important part that I wanted to point out is do you have an alternative online assessment to share? So there's a little submission form here. So if anyone has an interesting assignment that they'd like to add to our bank of exemplars, we have about, oh I should have counted, we have about 24 or so across disciplines, across like from an introductory level class to a more advanced group projects, individual projects, formative and summative assessments. But we really want to build this out to be a big robust alternative assessment bank. Let's go up back up and take a look. I'll just let me know how I'm doing for time too. Am I okay? I'm looking at my facility. Okay, thank you so much. All right, so let's go back here and I'll show you an example of one of the exemplars and I'll point out a couple of things. So we did a little bit of custom styling to pressbooks because we wanted it to look a little bit snazier. And here we are over contents. So the introduction is here. Sorry, I'm not used to these windows. So we had a student perspective just talking about how they wanted alternatives to conventional exams. It's a great opinion piece written by our students. We had the instructor perspective, which is a wonderful faculty member from Brock University. And I am totally in alignment with her style of designing a course is after week eight consolidates. So after week eight, she does not introduce any more material. That's when you assess all of the content that you introduced in the first eight weeks of a traditional 13 week course. We also applied Blooms taxonomy of everyone anyone's familiar with that taxonomy of learning and how you scaffold to deeper learning. So we did tag each of the assignment exemplars with the Blooms taxonomy levels looking for those, you know, higher levels of analyzing creating. So we talked about that in case we just gave an overview of Bloom. So in case people weren't familiar with that. But the bulk of the book or resource is in this, let's see if I was right 20, I said 24. Okay, I'll take a look at this one. This is one of since most of us mentioned project as being one of the most pivotal assignment examples in your educational history. So here's an example of a multimodal culminating project. So each example we use the same format. So we have a description of what the assignment is. We have guidelines. There's the guidelines on this particular assessment. So we could do a multimodal narrative. You could do a multimodal presentation. You could do a media artifact. We have proposal documents that can just be copied over and used for the instructor. There's a metadata document for for students feedback in Cacheek. So how the project is assessed. There's the evaluation criteria there. So we could use that for development of a rubric. And then we also included technology used for each of the examples in case they did use a particular technology needed a little bit of tips for students on how to use that. We also include facilitation tips for the instructor. So just how the project or how the assignment had gone historically. What what the student feedback was like. Maybe things that you might want to consider if you're considering implementing into a class. And then we also included student examples. So that was the basic format for each of the assignment examples. And that's so and so our our hope and dream for this is that we have more assignments added more exemplars from each of you maybe. But we also have other plans. We want to keep this project sustained and used. We originally intended to include a workshop design. So a whole part to the press book on how you might if you are in a teaching learning profession facilitate a workshop on the on alternative assessments with you know slides and activities and and and stuff like that. But also have a self paced opportunity for people who just want to go through and consider it on their own. So that is underway right now. It's not quite ready. We're the English version is complete but the French version is currently being translated. And we also realize that you know we have a small bank right now that we started with. But we want we hope that this will grow to be hundreds if not thousands. And if press books doesn't actually isn't actually the best way to host these that might be confusing. But we have to figure on how to categorize those assessments by individual group formative summative maybe by disciplinary area. So that's that's our next steps in this project beyond the exam. And we are I just want to do another plug for more exemplar. So please consider any examples that you'd like even if you're thinking Joanne I have this idea that I really like to talk about. I don't have all the instructions I can interview you and get all the instructions and do all the work for you. So we really would like to see that grow. So thank you so much. I just wanted to thank the McMaster Brock and Boreal Development teams and all of you for your attention on this. If you do want to get in touch with me either here I'm wandering around the conference but you can also email me or find me on Twitter. So thank you very much. Well there's a mic up here yeah. Thank you very much Joanne for your presentation. It's very interesting but my question is not for you. It's for the two people on the on the room here who said that they have all the kind of exam or something like that. I would be interested to hear about it. Oh the other the other projects. Yes. Yeah. The kind of project just to know so sorry about that.  Oh no there's one wireless one here. Oh here it comes. So anyone who I think it was anyone who said that they had something. Okay you're pointing. There yeah and you yeah. So yeah thank you so much for this presentation and I think the first the introduction with how do we learn more with which exam it's very very relevant because we have loads of exam and QCM and it's not the way we learn and the project based exams is really really impressive and I'm using it but when I think about how do I learn the more the most it's without any evaluation. It's my free will and my interest and it's very related to the project I'm working with. So it's I think the project base is very interesting because it's leading the people to what they will do in the future as well. It's preparing them to learn by themselves to achieve big project. That's a really good point and that's actually when we're talking about the project of course we were talking about ungrading and how we maybe we how do we capture those it really is an experiential learning when you're working on a project and learning the most and how do we capture those. So definitely how to be more creative and more personalized I guess into people how the way that people learn but I was wondering your your yes down here you had the um you put your hand up for an other assessment that was the most valuable for you and what was that. Well first of all thank you very much for your presentation Juan and maybe the first thing that the question that you have asked from what which assessment have you learned much brings me to a reflection it's not yet mature in my head but I think that the future would be like learning activities and assessment activities will convert so they wouldn't be two different things yeah because actually we assess to make sure that they have learned and if the mechanism is the same to assess that learning has occurred and then we don't need any other assessment mechanism and actually that driven me has driven me to three assessment methods that I had in my classes and for which I have an excellent feedback from the students and really serious students that I know they want to learn they don't want to grade. The first thing was simulations I'm an information systems professor so I teach ERP technologies and things of the sort and if you just tell them what is enterprise integration they wouldn't they wouldn't understand unless they were different hats so the project is just simulations about mega softwares where they play roles of production managers the warehouse whatever procurement specialist and they do the whole thing and actually maybe in a day or two they understand the whole curriculum of one year where you had to explain different modules different rules different privileges and stuff like that. So simulations was one the second thing I used and that was also very well appreciated is evaluation through content development there is a famous saying of Albert Einstein that says that I cannot really don't take me by the word but the meaning was if you cannot explain something so probably you don't understand it from the very beginning. So I brought my students to produce pedagogical videos about technology and technology concepts and technology usages and I was really they proved me that they understand everything first second I think that they have even presented bits and pieces that I couldn't present myself in this way. Yeah so this was great. The third was debates driven by learning objectives of a certain course so I had this was very difficult to scale because debates were different topics and you had to they had to defend against different questions and this had been you should have been leveled those are great again thank you. No no I'm answering the question that was asked. Okay so they were leveled to level them because it's not the question addressed to everyone or something is the same exercise but this also did great because they could find arguments and statistics and different things from the curriculum. That's great thank you so much for that and I know that I'm going to be contacting you for examples. You know I'm a Canada graduate and I'm very much voice to Canada. Oh great. Congratulations. Yeah thank you so yeah simulation teaching a lesson as kind of the second and then the debate are wonderful examples yes thank you. Thank you very much for this presentation and this idea it's great. I wanted to know about feedback so what do you mean by feedback is it I don't know is the results of the exercises or yeah a sort of satisfaction right from the students or both actually yeah it was we had feedback from from instructors who had implemented the assignment example you know how they found it what tips they would give another instructor so that kind of feedback and also the feedback was as what they heard from students. Yeah usually it's just data that we are already have collected through a course evaluation so that is shared back anonymously of course to us yeah great thank you. Hello I'd like to ask you a last question maybe yes so thank you very much for your very nice presentation my question is regarding actually actually my colleagues asked me first to ask a question regarding the licenses for for sharing yes and the second one my question is regarding the standards or the norms that you may be used for for the design of the assessment whether you are comfortable to IMS QTI question and test interoperability standard which makes maybe the operability of sharing and exchange exchanging these resources among platforms. Yeah thank you. Great thanks I think all of the assessment examples anything contained in the book is CC by NCSA so freely used and adapt to and yeah so I'm not sure I understood your second question I'm sorry yeah the format if it's adaptable definitely yeah and we're even finding that the technology used we didn't really apply in some instances it's like a learning management system or a word you know so yeah we definitely see that we see some adaptability that we might want to add different categories yeah thank you. I think I have just one last question. Oh sure. Just a quick one where do you see this being you know transformed or used in the next two years? Well that's where we want more examples to come in and to become like the source that people I know there's like we're so lucky we have so much so even when we first were helping faculty with that alternative online assessments there's so much out there available so we're just looking to hire more student development teams and getting asking instructors if we can use and build to our bank of exemplars so we have a lot and have them categorized so people can easily find them so communicating and disseminating and and hearing about how people with value that people find with the resource and and growing it from there yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you everyone.


Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's edition of Barnes Takeout, your daily serving of art from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. I'm Bill Perthys, the Bernard C. Watson Director of Adult Education, and happy Juneteenth, and happy Father's Day, or at least an early happy Father's Day. In celebration of both of those, of Juneteenth as well as Father's Day, I've chosen a painting that's by the American artist, Horace Pippin. It's in Gallery Five, and here we are in Gallery Five, and we're looking at the West Wall, and the Pippin I'm talking about is here over the door. Let me show it to you. It was painted by Horace Pippin in 1934, and it's called Abraham Lincoln and his father building their cabin on Pigeon Creek. As I said, I chose this both in celebration of Juneteenth, as well as for Father's Day. As you probably know, Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States, and it commemorates this day in 1865, when Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, entered Galveston, Texas, with the news that the Civil War had ended, and that all slaves were now free. This came two and a half years after President Lincoln declared the Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect in January 1, 1863. On that day in 1865, Major General Granger read Proclamation number three, which said, and I quote, the people of Texas are informed that in accordance with the proclamation from the executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection there to for existing between them becomes that between employer and hired laborer. And in this picture, appropriately enough for both of these occasions, Horace Pippin portrays a moment when the adolescent Abraham Lincoln and his father are clearing land and building their cabin on a new plot of land in Little Pigeon Creek in Indiana. And this event more or less takes place in 1816, 1817. The Lincoln family moved from where Lincoln was born across the Ohio River, rather in Kentucky. Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809 in Sinking Spring Farm there in Indiana. But the family moved across the Ohio River when Lincoln was seven for a couple reasons. One, there was a dispute over the title of their land in Kentucky, and his father didn't have the funds to be able to contest that. But also because Kentucky had been admitted to the Union in 1792 as a slave state, and Lincoln's father, Thomas, was morally opposed to slavery. Indiana, on the other hand, had been excluded from slavery by way of the Northwest Ordinance. And this picture is one of four that portray important moments in the life of the 16th President. So as I mentioned here, we see Lincoln, who I read as being the figure in the foreground and his father behind him. Now, this scene actually takes place when Lincoln would have been about eight years old. So he's shown perhaps a little older than that. But he's working with his father to clear the land. This land that they settled on in Little Pigeon Creek was extremely remote. There were no roads or paths that even led to it. It was densely forested. So in order to clear land, to have land to be able to farm to support themselves, they had to clear that land. And in the process, they used the trees that they were cutting down to build a more permanent housing for them. They had actually moved there the year before and had spent that first winter in temporary shelters. And in many ways, the picture is very evocative, despite the fact that Pippin used a fairly limited range of colors. He uses them extremely effectively, very dynamically. If we look at just the landscape to begin with, it's painted out of hues that are common to many Pippin's works. That is, they're relatively dark. They're somewhat tonal, so we get sort of lighter and darker tones that suggest things. And it's very dense. We get a sense of the thickness of the forest. And he's given us really remarkable details as well. So we get the leaves on the trees. And then he uses color as a way of really bringing out the figures. So the boldest colors in this picture are the white and the blue. And that white and blue is shared both in the shirts of the figures of Lincoln and his father. His father, as I'm reading it, is the figure in the blue shirt. And then those same colors are carried up into the sky. And we get a sense of this clear sky, clear blue sky with these large puffy white clouds. There's a clarity to the picture space. And then Pippin gives us other details. For instance, the color of the leaves. And as we see them dotting the air here, suggesting that we're moving towards autumn. And that creates a sense of sort of urgency in the picture as we see the two figures hewing the logs in order to build the cabin that they would need for the coming winter. As I mentioned, Lincoln lived in this cabin with his family from 1816 until 1830. So until he was 21. So a young man until he moved out on his own. And in many ways this picture also prefigures some important upcoming moments in Lincoln's life. One is his stance on slavery. As I mentioned, one of the reasons that his father moved the family from Kentucky to Indiana was in opposition to slavery. And needless to say, as the 16th president, Abraham Lincoln went on to not only be the head of the Union Army to fight for the Civil War, but also through the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves. And that Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in 10 states not under Union control. And that was a very, that was a Catholic moment within the Civil War. But in it also, this picture also prefigures some tragedies in Lincoln's life. Just a year after this event would have taken place. Lincoln's mother Nancy died of milk poisoning, something that was not unfortunately was not uncommon out where pasture land clear pasture land was not available and cows were foraging in the forest. And needless to say, we know the tragedy of the assassination of Lincoln. And so in many ways, this picture both captures a bonding moment for Lincoln and his father as they literally through their own hands build the home for their further family, but also suggests the kinds of tragedies that are to come. But also the important role that Lincoln played in creating the freedoms of that the Civil War was fought for. So I hope this picture both creates a moment of celebration for those of you celebrating Juneteenth. But I also want to wish the best to all of my fellow fathers out there. I just ask that you don't put your your sons and your daughters through quite as much labor as it seems Lincoln and his father are at work here in this this picture by ours, Pippin. In any case, join us again for our next Barnes Takeout. Thanks for joining us. I'm Tom Collins, new Bauer family executive director of the Barnes Foundation. I hope you enjoyed Barnes Takeout. Subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art. Thanks for watching and for your support of the Barnes Foundation.


All right, what's up everybody forest here ripping two boxes of 2022 leaf metal pop century for Scott H Good luck, buddy. Let's see some nice hits here pop century man a lot of fun All right, here we go First up is a Joan Collins Joan Collins auto for a four on the Joan Collins next you've got a Richard E. Grant Richard E. Grant's auto nine of ten a Beyonce relic heck.  It's all it says very cool Queen B and an Adam driver auto really good box there Adam driver for four Sweet Kylo Ren auto. Yeah, I mean a good box of pop century there for four in the driver one more Good luck Scott Let's keep it going into this next one here. All right, there's a during office fan. You got a Kate Flannery auto Kate Flannery 11 to 20 next up is a Robert Wagner auto to a four Got a relic card Denzel Washington Academy Award winner Denzel Washington. He's one of the Academy Award, right? I just assume he has Has to have I can't think of what film but Yeah, maybe best supporting for like glory or something. I don't know Denzel relic and a Norman Reedus auto Norman Reedus 28 out of 50 Appreciate it Scott. Get those right out to you


Out with the old and in with the new with Appalachian wireless trading and upgrade to one of the hottest smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S9 and save $100 better service bigger savings that's today's Appalachian wireless and East Kentucky Network company to your agreement required. Well, I'm here to support a friend of mine, Jonathan Webb. You know, Jonathan, I remember we met a couple years ago at a restaurant in DC. He was telling me about this passion project he had called Appalachian to see where it is now and the time and the effort and the work that he's put into this. It's just a tremendous thing that he's doing, especially that he's doing it here in this region in East Kentucky. And I'm very proud of him for what he's accomplished and I think it's going to do great things for this region.


So broadband and mobile, I think, is actually the world's furthest-reaching technology, but not everybody has access to mobile and to mobile broadband. It's actually less than half of the world's population. 47% of men and women on this planet have access to mobile. That's 3.4 billion people, but that's less than half of the world's population. So we do need to have a big goal to make sure we get at least an additional billion people connected to the mobile internet by 2020. And for this, we need more spectrum, more harmonized spectrum to carry the broadband traffic. And we need to have the right regulatory environment. We need, for example, mobile operators to be able to share a network infrastructure to enable mobile broadband in rural areas and in areas that are less densely populated. I think that's the way to get mobile and mobile internet and broadband to more people in the world.


Aloha, I'm Mary Ann Sasaki with this Think Tech commentary. You shall freely open your hand to your brother to your needy and poor in your land. So says Deuteronomy 1511. It's a little secret and American affair that we are the richest democracy in the world with the most poverty and neither candidate is talking about it. Donald Trump talks about the great silent majority. Hillary Clinton speaks of the woes of the middle class, but who speaks for the poor? We know one apparently. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson proposed a war on poverty. We actually had a mandate to eradicate poverty in that decade. Whether you think President Johnson's broad programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, increased social security benefits, Head Start and Vista worked as immaterial. The issue is the president in his first inaugural speech directly confronted poverty as a national problem abhorrent to all right-minded people. Whether you think President Johnson's broad programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, increased social security benefits, Head Start and Vista worked as immaterial. The issue is the president in his first inaugural speech directly confronted poverty as a national problem abhorrent to all right-minded people. But what we have now is radio silence on the issue. We have candidates that promise more and better jobs, but that is a sock to the plummeting middle class who can barely hang on month to month. There is a huge swath of America for whom mere jobs will not solve the problem. For example, there is not a single state where a full-time worker earning the minimum wage can rent a market rate in one bedroom apartment for less than 30% of their income. More than 11 million households spend more than half of their income on rent. But neither candidate speaks about the dearth of affordable housing.  Spending a disproportionate amount for housing leaves less for other necessities like food and utilities and transportation. For some, there is no choosing. They remain homeless. We are far beyond talking about governmental programs. We need a radical change in thought. Americans need to demand compassion from ourselves and our leaders. Yes, it is difficult to give when you are yourself having a difficult financial time, but if not us, who and when? There has always been an underestimation and misunderstanding about the depth and breadth of poverty in our country. Michael Harrington's The Other America, published in 1962, caused national attention to be focused on the problem resulting in the war on poverty. Since the 60s, there has been little compassion for the economically least among us. Indeed, since the 1970s, people have been focused on depriving the poor of federal benefits and slowly federal and state welfare programs have been stripped bare. Now our solution to the problem is to ignore it, or when forced to confront it, blame it on the idle poor. But by now, I think even the most cynical among us can admit there aren't plenty of jobs for everyone. The blue-collar white Americans who have historically painted the poor as dependent and lazy too are finding that work is not so easy to come by. Indeed, the fury against illegal immigration is a manifestation of job insecurity among the lower middle class. Moreover, we cannot consider the class issue of poverty without considering the racial ramifications. African-American households are more than twice as likely to be food insecure as white, non-Hispanic households. For those who say racism is in our past, for those who say everyone has an equal opportunity, I say, how do you start from way behind and make up the difference in the race? If living a decent life in the United States is indeed a race. Poverty is historical, cultural, generational, and endemic in certain urban and rural areas. A few ticks off the unemployment rate will barely touch poverty. It needs a great deal more. That is why I advocate a new war on poverty. We should be downsizing the military and stop wasting billions, if not trillions, on futile political guerrilla warfare and dedicate such money to affordable housing and education. Bernie Sanders, a warhorse who remembers well the war on poverty, understood this. We cannot function as a society without the fundamentals of human dignity. Food, clothing, shelter, some security against economic peaks and valleys. What are the solutions? That is for sociologists, political scientists, faith leaders, and others more qualified than I to say. What I am saying is it is time to stop keeping this America's dirty little secret and bring it to the fore. There is no shame in poverty. It is not a matter of fault. There will always be poverty, but let us at least treat it as a pernicious problem it is not as a character flaw or simple twist of fate. Mahalo, I'm Marianne Sasaki and this has been a Think Tech Commentary.


Robotics and AI are expected to deal with many of the global challenges that we are facing. Poverty, international conflict, health problems. And this means that they will leave the factory floors and that they will come into the environments where we are most, in our homes, in our streets, in our schools and in our hospitals. Here's an example of a typical environment. And these environments are social. We are social animals by nature and we interact socially and we obey to social rules all the time. It tells us what is normal and it tells us how to behave. So if we take this technology and put it in these environments, this technology will stand out if it doesn't comply, if it doesn't have social intelligence. And when we are not socially intelligent, we are seen as rude or threatening and people really don't like us. And this is the same with when you use technology and put it in environments. Here's an example of how we made computers more socially intelligent and how can we make computers empathize? It's a feeding robot that helps paralyze people to eat. And we made it actually quite a simple module that listens to the conversation at the table and then offers the food at natural intervals during the dinner, which allows a person to completely participate in the ritual that dining is together. So we can do it for simple things, but what about more complex social situations? Here you can see speed dating. We made a lot of people speed date and then knowing the outcomes, we could have the computer think about what were the parameters that predicted a match. And in this case it was the variation in the distance between the two daters. In part it's wisdom to you. But it shows that we can deal with quite complex social situations. And the core idea behind making machines socially intelligent is that sentient beings need social referencing to learn. And we do this much more for instance than chimpanzees. We hold our babies, we look at them, we put them in a chair, and we talk to them, we wave at them, we show them objects, and babies emulate our behavior and they learn. And it's thought that the social referencing leads to empathy and knowing theory of minds and even enculturation. Enculturation allows us much more effectively for instance than chimpanzees to teach each other how to use the thinking tools that we all have in our brain very effectively. So just to compare it takes a chimpanzee child about seven years to learn to hit a nut with a rock. So social referencing is so great, robots should do it too. But first there are some technical challenges that we need to solve for instance low energy consumption. Throughout these technical challenges what these robots really need to do is understand the social environment that they are in. So this robot, Spencer robot at Schiphol Airport, it needs to go around a little family and not drive through them. And here you see the frog robot, it's an outdoor guide robot. And this robot has to respond naturally to people. It has to behave naturally. And here you see a blind person trying to understand frog and frog trying to understand the blind person. The model that frog has of its users must also deal with impairments. And what happens is when we put these behaviors into robots they are easier to understand because they are much more familiar. But it also means that they become very rich social characters. And it may even mean that we empathize with them or maybe even develop a social bond with such robots. This is the easel robot and you can see a boy really engaging with this robot and even though one of the huge challenges is really these technical challenges that I told you about to get these robots running for long periods of time a very large challenge is our own fear because we are not quite sure what happens to people when they start relating to robots and if they change how they relate to people. So it's extremely important that we design and develop these robots to fit the role that they have to do. Here you see a Teresa Telepresence robot that elderly people can use to participate at a distance. So they log into the robot from a remote location. And over time the artificial intelligence takes over their positioning behavior and so they can focus on socializing. These robots need to seamlessly integrate into our environments but they are hugely integrated machines themselves. They need machine learning, computer vision, they need planning, thinking, hardware, manipulation, navigation. So you can't just build a robot with one discipline. You need a lot of disciplines to come together to realize an optimal solution. There are many applications that we can think of for social robots. You can think of an exoskeleton that knows where your friends are, you can think of drones that know the difference between civilians and soldiers, a search and rescue robot that knows when someone is in pain, a car that knows that you're distracted, a house that knows that someone doesn't belong there. So while we are all thinking about what robots can do, we should make robots think about us and what we do. So I've showed you that machines can respond and deal with social behaviors, our social behaviors. And I'm very interested to know how social robotics could mean anything in your field of interest or passion.


Morning traders Patrick Munley here with another tip on chart it want to draw your attention today to a developing opportunity in the dollar yen. We've been in a contracting range contracting triangle pattern here, tested and had a break of the lower bound of that triangle but we've had some pretty sharp reversal patterns developed and got an outside reversal followed by an inside pinbar continuation to the upside pattern and what I'm looking for now is a break of 10480 set long positions targeting initially in the quality objective and the top side of the triangle pattern 105 95 106 17 upside targets protective stop just below the lows today 104 20 as always traders plan the trade trade the plan the most importantly manage your risk until next time thanks very much