chatgpt-limitations.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonixchatgpt-limitations.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors. Speaker1: Welcome to Radical AI, a podcast about technology, power, society and what it means to be human in the age of Information. We are your hosts. Dylan and Jess were two PhD students with different backgrounds researching AI and technology ethics.Speaker2: And our last episode we covered some of the basics of chat. Gpt three. In this episode, we dig a bit deeper. We interview Dr. Emily M Bender and Dr. Casey Fassler about the limitations of chat. Gpt three We cover ethical considerations, bias and discrimination, and the importance of algorithmic literacy in the face of chat bots.Speaker1: Emily M Bender is a professor of linguistics and an adjunct professor in the School of Computer Science and the Information School at the University of Washington, where she's been on the faculty since 2003. Her research interests include multilingual grammar, engineering, computational semantics and the societal impacts of language technology. Emily was also recently nominated as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.Speaker2: Casey FESSLER is an associate professor in information science at University of Colorado Boulder. She researches and teaches in the areas of technology, ethics, Internet law and policy and online communities. Also a public scholar, she is a frequent commentator and speaker on topics of technology, ethics and policy. And her research has been covered everywhere from The New York Times to Teen Vogue.Speaker1: And on a more personal note, we just wanted to shout out that we are so excited to share this interview with Emily and Casey with all of you, because we have known Emily and Casey for quite a while now. Emily, we first met when she was on the show, I think it was almost three years ago now. She was one of our our first community members, and she has been an avid supporter of the podcast and of this project basically from its beginning. And Casey is my one of my PhD advisors at the University of Colorado. So I've known her for quite a few years now too. And both of them come from totally different angles and areas of expertise. When it comes to chat bots and chat specifically, we have Casey, who has the law and policy background, and then we have Emily, who has the natural language processing background. And so we were just super excited to bring them together in conversation for this interview and we're really excited to share the outcome with all of you. We are on the line today with Casey Kessler and Emily Bender. Casey and Emily, welcome to the show and welcome back to the show.Speaker3: Super, super excited to be joining you for this.Speaker4: Thank you. This is Casey, and I'm very excited to be on the podcast for the first time.Speaker1: Yay! And today we are talking about a topic that has been receiving a lot of news attention as of late. Chat. We're going to begin with the basics here. So, Emily, our first question is for you. Could you briefly summarize how GPT works and what makes this technology so novel in the first place?Speaker3: Yeah. So. So what is chat GPT? Chat GPT at its core is what we call a large language model, so that the internals of it, the sort of guts are an enormous number of what's called parameters in this very large neural network that have been set through a training procedure where the system sees just piles and piles and piles of text and computer code. I think in the case of chat GPT. The text isn't just English and it's training task is predict what word comes next, predict what word comes next, and then compare that prediction to what was actually in the text. And the training algorithm then adjusts those parameters based on how right or wrong it was. And it keeps doing that over and over and over again, over just an absolutely enormous amount of text. That's the first pass. Once you've got that large language model, what they've done, I have to say it's not entirely known outside of open AI. They have not been open about this. But the blog post basically said we've done some further training and some of it seem to have to do with dialogue to make it be more like a dialogue system, because most of the text you can find on the web is not dialogue. And so there's some training about dialogue, and then there's this phase called reinforcement learning from human feedback, where human raters were given output of the system and asked to rate it as as good or bad or helpful or unhelpful or whatever their rating system was. And so now the system is not only trained to predict what the next word should be, but what the next word should be so that it would be well rated by humans, such as those who are doing the ratings.Speaker3: There's another layer in there which has to do with trying to suppress toxic or hateful or otherwise problematic output. And we learned from Billy Perrigo reporting in Time magazine that that was outsourced to Kenya to poorly paid workers and who had to do this very traumatic work of looking at these terrible outputs. So that that's sort of how it's built. So you also asked what's novel about this tech? And I would say not much. What's novel is the way it's been promoted. So we already had, well, internal to Google. There was already LAMDA, for example, that became big news when Blake Lemoine decided that Lambda was sentient and needed help, which is a very similar system as far as is known. There was already GPT three from Openai, which is kind of a predecessor. It didn't have this dialogue overlay, but it did have the ability to generate coherent seeming text that would be somewhat pleasing to humans. But what's new here with GPT is that open? And I set it up with this interface that allowed people all over the world to play with it. And so you went from a world where it was basically people in tech who were playing with this stuff to people from all walks of life, playing with it and being exposed to it for the first time. And I think that's the real novelty.Speaker2: And that novelty we've seen a lot of hot takes on in the media and beyond. And as our, I guess, social media star on this episode, Casey, the Tik Tok star, I know that you're well embedded into a lot of these communities, a lot of these conversations. And I'm mostly wondering, what are you hearing and what's your reaction to it?Speaker4: I think that a lot of people are very impressed by what can be by what can be accomplished with with chat or what it what it can do. And I think it's reasonable that they're impressed. It's it's impressive. But in in a way that like I feel like the shine is going to wear off kind of quickly because, you know, the first time that you ask chat to write fanfiction of Sherlock Holmes on the Star Trek Enterprise, you are incredibly impressed that it can do that at all. Right. But then as you as you keep going, you're like, well, it can do that, but it's not very good at it. And my friend, the fan fiction writer, could have written something much better. So I do think that there is some extent to which this sort of like, Oh, this feels like magic is going to wear away a little bit. But I do think that one of the challenges here is that everything that Emily just explained, which I think makes a lot of a lot of sense to a lot of our listeners, is still kind of challenging to wrap your head around, like what this actually means. Like, you know, people are saying like, oh, it's just fancy autocomplete and like kind of but also when you actually then see it do something, you're like, Well, that seems much more magical than than autocomplete.Speaker4: And I was actually reminded, like when everyone started talking about chat. Gpt, which, you know, is a chat bot, I was thinking back to Eliza so the, the, the chat bot that that Joseph Weizenbaum created many, many, many years ago and I think wrote an article about it in the 1960s and. It was you know, it was procedural. It was mimicking a psychoanalyst. And so the way that it worked was just a set of rules. Like if you say, you know, my mother makes me sad. Well, tell me more about your mother. And that makes a lot of sense, right? But even then, he pointed out that, like this was sufficient to really dazzle people at the time. But as soon as you explained how it worked, like as soon as you could use language understandable enough to explain, like the inner workings of it, the magic crumbled away. And so I think that's part of the challenge here, is that it actually is kind of difficult to explain how this works at a level that the magic crumbles away for people.Speaker3: Yeah, I think that that's spot on, Casey. Part of the reason for it, as far as I can tell, is the unfathomable size of these training data sets. So we just don't have lived experience with working with that much text in working memory or frankly at all. And so it's really hard to have an intuitive sense of just what you can get from distribution patterns over enormous collections of text. And so people can say, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it's fancy autocomplete or I know it's a stochastic parrot, but still, how did it do that? And especially it's very good at anything to do with mimicking the form of language. So, you know, write instructions for operating a VCR in the language of a Shakespearean sonnet. It will do that in a very impressive way. And I think that some of the magic there is that that's a difficult trick for humans. There are some humans who are very good at it, but it's also something that we find impressive because of what kinds of mastery it would require a human to have. But that doesn't mean that Chadwick is doing it in the same way. Ted has no understanding, no communicative intent, no sense of what the sort of social meaning or value of VCR instructions and Shakesp
Martyn Ware’s just written his memoir, ‘Electronically Yours Vol 1’, looking back at his early days in Sheffield, his brutal exit from the Human League, the rise and fall of Heaven 17 and the BEF and his lucrative afterlife as a producer. Hear this and you will learn about … … the charisma of Tina Turner. … “a Dear John Letter” from Terence Trent D’Arby. … being “John the Evangelist for the coming of OMD and Gary Numan”. … the skills a producer needs. … David Bowie seeing the Human League in ’79 – “If God comes down and says you’re the Anointed One you’re not going to argue with it.” … the first record he bought (Pretties For You by Alice Cooper). … the character of Sheffield – “bolshiness and pride in craft”. … wanting the first Human League album to fail but getting one per cent of its profit. … being “blind-sided” when they threw him out. … producing Hot Gossip and Dan Hartman. … being in a band that was “a sub-Jim Morrison mumble over the top of some soundscapes”. … the life-changing arrival of “huge cheques”. … and whether the original Human League will ever reunite. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Electronically-Yours-Vol-My-Autobiography/dp/0349135150 @martynware Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon for a whole host of excellent and extra content, benefits an... === Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLVYu7t6UZA Downloaded by http://huffduff-video.snarfed.org/ on Sun Sep 18 12:12:27 2022 Available for 30 days after download
[00:00:06] Gary Bisbee, Ph.D.: Our guest today, Rasmus Hougaard asks the question, how can you balance compassion for your people with effectiveness and getting the job done? Rasmus is the founder and CEO of Potential Project, a leadership development consultancy. He’s the author of “Compassionate Leadership”, for which he surveyed 350 CEOs and CHROs. Rasmus found that the most successful leaders have a compassionate and caring attitude, while also displaying a business acumen and courage to make difficult decisions. The best leaders can do hard things in a human way. Rasmus describes how to lead across age and cultural differences. He encourages leaders to unlearn robotic prescriptions for mentoring and leadership, and to approach conversations with vulnerability. We discussed the great resignation, which Rasmus frames as an opportunity. Employees want good work experiences. Companies that can provide them will attract and retain the best talent. Above all, Rasmus recommends that leaders take care of themselves, get enough sleep, and take time to rest and recharge. Only when you take care of yourself can you take care of others. Well, good afternoon, Rasmus, and welcome. [00:01:26] Rasmus Hougaard: Thank you very much, Gary. A pleasure to be here. [00:01:28] Gary Bisbee, Ph.D.: We’re pleased to have you at this microphone. As you know, this show is about sustaining leadership excellence and you fit right in with your career that involves really significant work as an author. You’re, of course, the founder and CEO of a global business. So what led, if I can ask, Rasmus, what led to the founding of Potential Project? I know we are covering multiple years there, but what really led you to found your global company? [00:02:01] Rasmus Hougaard: I think, for anything in most people’s lives, that’s not just one thing that led to that, but there’s probably at least three strands that leads to that. The first one was, when I was quite young, I was about 17, I actually completely lost confidence in the Western model of getting a good education, getting a good partner, getting a good car, getting a good career. All of that just didn’t add up to me. I didn’t see the point in it. And I felt I had to look elsewhere for a different way of doing life. And I went to Nepal and India and stayed there for quite some time and studied with some, let’s say, spiritual teachers from Buddhist tradition and other traditions that taught me meditation and taught me a different way of looking at the world and at life, not thinking about yourself first, but thinking about the impact and positivity you can bring to the world. That was definitely what was the foundation. Then I came back. I got my degree. I became a researcher and really learned the value of data, the value of thorough study of a situation before you come in and try to change something. Then I moved from there into corporates. And that was like when the coin dropped. I was working in the Sony Corporation as a leader for a number of years. And I saw how my employees and my peers and my superiors were constantly stressed out. They were not creative. They were not happy. They were overworked. They were burned out. And one day my own boss called me. We had this major, major meeting with our largest clients and he called me five minutes before and said he couldn’t make it. And I said, why not? And he said, I’m sitting in my car. And I said, what are you doing in my car? And he said, I can’t move. And he had just completely, out of stress and burnout, lost his ability to drive the car. I was just shocked by that. And it made me open the eyes and see he was not the only one, but everybody was suffering. Nobody was living up to their potential. And I thought, when I was young, I received all these amazing practices to train my own mind and to train my heart, to be a good person and to be clear minded, focused and resilient, and creative, and here amongst all these people that don’t have that. So I got to do something about that. And that’s when I decided to start Potential Project. [00:04:23] Gary Bisbee, Ph.D.: Well, can you describe it for us? [00:04:27] Rasmus Hougaard: Yeah. So, Potential Product is, as you said, a global company. We are in some 30 countries working with around, I would say, 500 global clients like Microsoft and Cisco and Accenture, and all the big companies. And what we do is research leadership development, and consulting, really helping our clients to ultimately create a more human world at work, creating a more human world of work where people can be truly themselves, where people can feel truly cared for, where leaders are really good human beings that unlearn management and relearn being humans. It’s all about creating a world where, I have three kids and they are going to join the workforce in just a few years. I want them to have a good experience. And that’s the kind of world of work that we’re trying to create. [00:05:16] Gary Bisbee, Ph.D.: Rasmus, we’ve learned through the years, thousands of interviews, that if we can hear from our guests about their early years growing up, how they’ve evolved as a leader, that that gives us a better understanding of their leadership style and performance. And to that end, let me just start with, what was life like growing up for you, Rasmus? [00:05:40] Rasmus Hougaard: It was actually really wonderful. It was beautiful. I loved my childhood. My parents came from a part of Denmark that is quite conservative and they moved to this little island in the Baltic Sea. A lot of artists, creative thinkers, moved there and my parents were some of those. So it was a very, very beautiful community of very free spirited people. And it was a lot of nature. So I just, I see myself as this little boy walking around in the woods, around the lakes, at the big cliffs at the water, with the waves coming up. That was what life was like, and just surrounded by a lot of really beautiful people. It was a beautiful time. [00:06:21] Gary Bisbee, Ph.D.: Well, and I think about your time in New York City in contrast. That’s quite a change. But that sounds like an idyllic existence, really. What did the young Rasmus think about leadership? At what point did you begin to think about leadership? [00:06:40] Rasmus Hougaard: I would say I didn’t spare that a single thought when I was a child, not a single thought. But having said that, I think I learned a lot because the community that I was surrounded by was very non-hierarchical. The school I went to, there was not a school principal. Teachers together were making decisions. So everything was very flat in that way. Not hierarchical, not top down. And I think that has just always been how I thought about how to get stuff done, is through influence and through communication, but not through mandates and commands. That has definitely shaped how I see leadership. [00:07:20] Gary Bisbee, Ph.D.: How about your parents? Have they influenced your leadership style? [00:07:25] Rasmus Hougaard: I think so, a lot. They both were in leadership positions in healthcare and social work. And I think they also embodied this very flat, very, you lead by influence, you lead by having good conversations. And so it’s just always been natural to me. I’ve always questioned the other way of leading, the more traditional top-down. It just never really made sense to me. [00:07:45] Gary Bisbee, Ph.D.: You’re a prolific author, Rasmus. Do you enjoy writing? [00:07:52] Rasmus Hougaard: I think it’s like anything else. If you have the time, anything is beautiful and wonderful, or at least can be. In my situation, leading some 200 people, I don’t have that much time. And when I used to, I really enjoyed writing. But these days, I have to confess I am using a lot of my colleagues and a professional writer to make things more polished and clear. But when I have the time, I really enjoy it, yes. [00:08:22] Gary Bisbee, Ph.D.: Do you have a pattern? Is there a certain time that you write? Some people write early in the morning? Some people write late at night. Any pattern? [00:08:31] Rasmus Hougaard: I tried to do that and it just didn’t work because the intensity of my work is just so that there’s no time of day where I’m standing still. So I realized I need to take out chunks of time. So it’s like everything from three to seven days, I just block completely, go to somewhere with no internet, and then just sit and write with the people I write with. [00:08:53] Gary Bisbee, Ph.D.: Well, let’s dig in to “Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things the Human Way”. One of the obvious questions, given that you operate in 30 some countries, does each culture interpret the term compassionate leadership the same way? [00:09:09] Rasmus Hougaard: No. No. There’s a lot of different interpretations of that. And even the word compassion is so differently understood even in a country like America, where it’s the native word. Case in point, most people don’t know what is the difference between empathy and compassion. And they think it’s the same thing. And it is absolutely not. Empathy is a really important skill for leaders. We need to be able to connect with the suffering we see in other people so they can see we understand them. And then there is communication. But as a leader, if we stay in empathy, where we are literally taking on the suffering of that other person, we can’t be effective in helping them and driving an agenda. So making that distinction is really important. And so in any culture, we have to help define what compassionate leadership means, including, the biggest misinterpretation people have is, when we’re compassionate, we’re nice. We’re nice people giving people what they want, which is not what compassion is. Compassion is about doing the right thing for people, helping them on their path, which can be giving really tough feedback, which can even be laying people off. So, yeah, there’s a lot of diff
Advances in technology have gradually been extending the human self beyond its biological extent, as we augment who we are with a variety of interconnected devices. There are obvious benefits to this — it lets us text our friends, listen to podcasts, and not get lost in strange cities. But as it changes how we interact with other people, it’s important to consider unintended side effects. Sherry Turkle is a psychologist and writer who specializes in the relationship between humans and their technology. She makes the case for not forgetting about empathy, conversation, and even the occasional imperfection in how we present ourselves to the world. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Sherry Turkle received her Ph.D. in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University. She is currently Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, and a licensed clinical psychologist. Among her awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, the Harvard Centennial Medal, and she was named “Woman of the Year” by Ms. Magazine. Her new book is The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir. Web siteMIT web pageWikipediaAmazon author pageTwitter Click to Show Episode Transcript Click above to close. 0:00:00.5 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, and welcome to The Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. In some sense, as it’s been often pointed out, podcasts aren’t that different in spirit from just radio shows. Right? You’ve had shows on the radio for a very long time, but of course there’s also a difference and a lot of the difference between good old-fashioned radio shows and newfangled podcasts is the device by which you are receiving this podcast. It could be a portable device, a phone or a tablet, or it might be your laptop, but this new bit of extra technology lets you do what makes podcast great, which is you can listen whenever you want. It’s not like a radio show, you have to wait for that time. You can pause it, you can skip through the parts you find interesting and so forth. It’s a tiny change, maybe, but it’s an important one that has been made possible by this bit of technology, these devices we carry around with us, and it’s just one example about how these devices have really been transforming our lives and arguably even ourselves, who we are. We identify with and use our devices in ways that really hit who we are deep down, and maybe the world’s leading expert in this phenomenon is today’s guest, Sherry Turkle. Sherry is a professor at MIT who started out studying psychology and has a degree in psychology, that’s her PhD, but she became interested early on in the idea of technology and how it affects our psychology. 0:01:31.3 SC: So she got a job at MIT, founding a new way of thinking about the relationship between human psychology and machines and technology, right at the beginning of artificial intelligence and the personal computer revolution and so forth. And even though she was initially quite optimistic about how we can use technology to make the human experience a better one, these days she finds herself, I think I would accurately say, more often pointing out the worries that we should have, not that she’s anti-technology in any way, but there are ways in which the technology sometimes moves ahead of our ability to understand what is going on. We all know how devices are extremely seductive. We can’t put down our phones. The young generation we have right now is growing up in a very different environment than older generations did because of how they relate to technology and to each other. It’s something where, in some sense, the art of conversation, of spontaneity of not knowing exactly what you wanna say and therefore spitting something out and maybe it’s not exactly right and you have to edit, that’s a kind of art form, or even just sitting in silence that you don’t need to face up to when you have this technological mediation. How does that change who we are, who we want to be, who we present ourselves as to the rest of the world? 0:02:52.9 SC: Sherry has a new book out, which is actually a memoir, it’s called The Empathy Diary: A Memoir is the subtitle, and the idea of writing a memoir is because she does have this interesting intellectual place where she’s sitting, and she wanted to try to explain how she got there through her personal story, and The Empathy Diaries is an appropriate title because she wants to emphasize the importance of empathy and personal connection in an age where machines dominate our communication so strongly. I say all this, of course, knowing perfectly well that I am recording this podcast on just such a bit of technology and you are listening to it on just such a bit of technology. So again, not anti-technology here, but this is exactly the kind of situation where we shouldn’t let our enthusiasms run away without thinking about it, being cognitive, really trying to understand where we’re going rather than just racing willy-nilly from one shiny object to another. That’s what this podcast is trying to get us in the mood to do, so let’s go. [music] 0:04:10.8 SC: Sherry Turkle, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. 0:04:14.5 Sherry Turkle: My pleasure. 0:04:16.6 SC: So this is an unusual interview. I’ve interviewed plenty of people who have books out, but you have a memoir out, which is a little bit of a departure, but I think it works well because we can use some of your biography to get into some of the substantive things that you’ve done over the years in technology and communication and so forth, so explain to the audience how you had a career path of becoming a psychologist and a clinical psychiatrist, I guess, and ended up at MIT thinking about technology. 0:04:45.1 ST: Well, you sort of had to be there at the time. [laughter] 0:04:51.6 ST: But really, that’s why I wrote the memoir. The memoir is not a personal memoir. The memoir is a memoir of a very particular kind. It’s a memoir that tries to integrate… It’s in the spirit of the question you just asked, because it tries to integrate my personal story and how I ended up doing the work that I do. So it answers that very question. I went to MIT because I wanted to have a place to finish a book I was writing about how intellectual ideas get into the public space and sort of hit the street after they’ve been in the seminar room. So my case study was actually the popularization of French psychoanalysis in the years after 1968. There was this very esoteric guy named Jacques Lacan, hardly anybody read him, very hard to read, very opaque. And then there were these may events kind of parallel to front student movement we had here, and all of a sudden Jacques Lacan was like a movie star. [chuckle] 0:06:23.2 ST: Everybody was in psychoanalysis. Everybody was quoting this very… Hardly understanding him, I guess. But psychoanalytic ideas were really in the popular culture in a very big way, and I was fascinated by this question of how ideas that are in academia… 0:06:43.7 ST: Really become part of public discourse, in particular, ideas about thinking about the self, because that really influences therapeutic practice. That’s what my thesis was, that’s what all my study had been about, was about how really, in a culture, you can only help people to get better from what’s troubling them if you use the ideas that are in the culture, you need to use the ideas that are popular in the culture, to get through to people and explain their troubles to them in the metaphors that they can understand. So in American society, Freudian ideas, talking to people about their repression, or their Oedipus complex, or their childhood, that had been kind of in the public imagination for 30, 40, 50 years. 0:07:47.4 SC: Sure. 0:07:48.5 ST: And not at all in France, those ideas have been shunned, and then all of a sudden in the 60s, they were very much in the popular culture. And I said it got processed. And I went to MIT because there was a dean there who thought this work was very, very relevant to thinking about how artificial intelligence was gonna get out, and ideas about thinking about the computer were going to get out into the popular culture. Ideas like “Don’t interrupt me, I need to clear my buffer.” 0:08:26.4 SC: [laughter] Not having enough bandwidth, yes. 0:08:29.4 ST: “No, I don’t want you to reprogram me.” Ideas that represented the mind as a machine, how are those ideas going to get out? And they felt they sort of needed someone like me, someone who was not a computer expert, but a sort of expert on how ideas hit the street. 0:08:54.8 SC: Yeah. 0:08:57.6 ST: Move from the classroom and the laboratory into the culture, to think about the new ideas of computers and artificial intelligence. And I was writing up my dissertation as a book, and I said, “That sounds interesting”, and I sort of went to see, and I absolutely fell in love with the question. 0:09:19.9 SC: Right. 0:09:21.1 ST: I absolutely fell in love with the question, and 40 more years later, I’m just as much in love with this question of how, for example, these ideas about the metaverse now, are going to change our ideas about thinking about, “is reality important?” 0:09:40.3 SC: Yeah. 0:09:43.6 ST: Or “are we okay that we’re gonna leave reality and go to the metaverse?” All of a sudden you have all these very influential people saying “I wanna live in the metaverse, let’s all make avatars in the metaverse, let’s spend a lot of money in the metaverse, let’s have commerce, and meetings, and lovers in the metaverse.” Well, what about reality? [laughter] Who’s gonna take care of business? Does that mean that we’re gonna be sold on the idea that not only isn’t face-to-face reality important, but reality reality isn’t important either? Can we not take care of our streets, and our homes, and our
Subscribe and 🔔 to OFFICIAL BBC YouTube 👉 https://bit.ly/2IXqEIn Stream original BBC programmes FIRST on BBC iPlayer 👉 https://bbc.in/2J18jYJ 🔘 Subscribe and 🔔 @BBC News 👉 https://bit.ly/3a1zyip 🔘 Stream BBC News live on BBC iPlayer 🔴 https://bbc.in/3b64IVP 🔘 Coronavirus / Covid-19 👉 https://bbc.in/3luQp33 🔘 Follow BBC News live updates here 👉 https://bbc.in/2JmUswL Health Secretary Matt Hancock leads todays Downing Street briefing, joined by NHS England national medical director Prof Stephen Powis. Follow the story 👉 https://bbc.in/3bsU66U BBC News Live | Coronavirus Press Conference | UK Government Press Briefing | BBC #BBC #BBCiPlayer #BBCNews #BBCCoronavirus #Coronavirus #Covid-19 #CoronavirusOutbreak #Corona #CoronavirusUK #borisjohnsonspeechonuklockdowntoday All our TV channels and S4C are available to watch live through BBC iPlayer, although some programmes may not be available to stream online due to rights. If you would like to read more on what types of programmes are available to watch live, check the 'Are all programmes that are broadcast available on BBC iPlayer?' FAQ 👉 https://bbc.in/2m8ks6v. === Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBq2dHhGBq8&t=27s Downloaded by http://huffduff-video.snarfed.org/ on Thu Jan 14 08:41:38 2021 Available for 30 days after download
Subscribe and 🔔 to OFFICIAL BBC YouTube 👉 https://bit.ly/2IXqEIn Stream original BBC programmes FIRST on BBC iPlayer 👉 https://bbc.in/2J18jYJ 🔘 Subscribe and 🔔 @BBC News 👉 https://bit.ly/3a1zyip 🔘 Stream BBC News live on BBC iPlayer 🔴 https://bbc.in/3b64IVP 🔘 Coronavirus / Covid-19 👉 https://bbc.in/3luQp33 🔘 Follow BBC News live updates here 👉 https://bbc.in/2JmUswL Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaking at the Downing Street news conference. Today he was joined by Jonathan Van-Tam, the deputy chief medical officer for England, and Brigadier Joe Fossey. Follow the story 👉 https://bbc.in/36nHUAp Covid vaccine: First 'milestone' vaccine offers 90% protection. Get the full story 👉 https://bbc.in/3pkmj4z BBC News Live | Coronavirus Press Conference | UK Government Press Briefing | BBC #BBC #BBCiPlayer #BBCNews #BBCCoronavirus #Coronavirus #Covid-19 #CoronavirusOutbreak #Corona #CoronavirusUK #borisjohnsonspeechonuklockdowntoday All our TV channels and S4C are available to watch live through BBC iPlayer, although some programmes may not be available to stream online due to rights. If you would like to read more on what types of programmes are available to watch live, check the 'Are all programmes that are broadcast available on BBC iPlayer?' FAQ 👉 https://bbc.in/2m8ks6v. === Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBBROyBB8v0 Downloaded by http://huffduff-video.snarfed.org/ on Wed Nov 11 23:06:48 2020 Available for 30 days after download
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UEFA Champions League Goals & Analysis. === Original video: https://www.cbs.com/shows/uefa-champions-league/video/NLCEvA1jIi45tcbo66pqO_CD6usk5yK3/post-show-9-champions-league-today/ Downloaded by http://huffduff-video.snarfed.org/ on Sun Aug 23 23:43:19 2020 Available for 30 days after download
UEFA Champions League Goals & Analysis. === Original video: https://www.cbs.com/shows/uefa-champions-league/video/vfWTkJLgEzTpaMdzLdrD2h1mQ_OzQtBB/post-show-8-champions-league-today/ Downloaded by http://huffduff-video.snarfed.org/ on Fri Aug 21 07:02:17 2020 Available for 30 days after download
League Podcast Reacts to Zack Snyder's Justice League. The League reacts to the Zack Snyder’s Justice League Snyder Cut News before they start another show! Release The Snyder Cut, they said. It will be fun, they said. Join Dursin, Clay, and Sam for their candid conversation.
The Master League is coming soon to the Pokemon GO Battle League. No matter how you cut it, the Master League is extremely expensive. This video highlights how you can best navigate the Master League on a budget. Basically, which Pokemon you don’t need to two move, cost effective Pokemon to two move, and how to build a simple and effective team for the Master League. This is not a complete Master League Meta Simplified or a Master League Simplified Guide, but can serve well as a Master League Team Building Guide. I hope to have my full Master League Simplified Guide up later this week! Support SwagTips on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/SwagTips SwagTips Merch: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/swag-tips-shop Budget Graphic: https://twitter.com/SwgTips/status/1231715845186912262 PvP IVs Guide: https://youtu.be/Z_BgzQipQ6g Great League 101: https://youtu.be/Y5c0SrQ7UkQ Ultra League 101: https://youtu.be/GTqksuC9Js4 GoBattleSim: https://pokemongo.gamepress.gg/gobattlesim PvPoke: https://pvpoke.com/battle Pokebattler: https://www.pokebattler.com/ SwagTips streams every Thursday at 7pm CT Twitch: https://go.twitch.tv/swagtips Follow me on FB & Twitter for updates, infographics, and savory memes FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/SwgTips/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/SwgTips #GOB... === Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiw7KPsGygs&feature=em-uploademail Downloaded by http://huffduff-video.snarfed.org/ on Tue Feb 25 00:35:14 2020 Available for 30 days after download
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The embedded audio player requires a modern internet browser. You should visit Browse Happy and update your internet browser today! I had called upon my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, one day in the autumn of last year and found him in deep conversation with a very stout, florid-faced, elderly gentleman with fiery red hair. With an apology for my intrusion, I was about to withdraw when Holmes pulled me abruptly into the room and closed the door behind me. “You could not possibly have come at a better time, my dear Watson,” he said cordially. “I was afraid that you were engaged.” “So I am. Very much so.” “Then I can wait in the next room.” “Not at all. This gentleman, Mr. Wilson, has been my partner and helper in many of my most successful cases, and I have no doubt that he will be of the utmost use to me in yours also.” The stout gentleman half rose from his chair and gave a bob of greeting, with a quick little questioning glance from his small fat-encircled eyes. “Try the settee,” said Holmes, relapsing into his armchair and putting his fingertips together, as was his custom when in judicial moods. “I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life. You have shown your relish for it by the enthusiasm which has prompted you to chronicle, and, if you will excuse my saying so, somewhat to embellish so many of my own little adventures.” “Your cases have indeed been of the greatest interest to me,” I observed. “You will remember that I remarked the other day, just before we went into the very simple problem presented by Miss Mary Sutherland, that for strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.” “A proposition which I took the liberty of doubting.” “You did, Doctor, but none the less you must come round to my view, for otherwise I shall keep on piling fact upon fact on you until your reason breaks down under them and acknowledges me to be right. Now, Mr. Jabez Wilson here has been good enough to call upon me this morning, and to begin a narrative which promises to be one of the most singular which I have listened to for some time. You have heard me remark that the strangest and most unique things are very often connected not with the larger but with the smaller crimes, and occasionally, indeed, where there is room for doubt whether any positive crime has been committed. As far as I have heard it is impossible for me to say whether the present case is an instance of crime or not, but the course of events is certainly among the most singular that I have ever listened to. Perhaps, Mr. Wilson, you would have the great kindness to recommence your narrative. I ask you not merely because my friend Dr. Watson has not heard the opening part but also because the peculiar nature of the story makes me anxious to have every possible detail from your lips. As a rule, when I have heard some slight indication of the course of events, I am able to guide myself by the thousands of other similar cases which occur to my memory. In the present instance I am forced to admit that the facts are, to the best of my belief, unique.” The portly client puffed out his chest with an appearance of some little pride and pulled a dirty and wrinkled newspaper from the inside pocket of his greatcoat. As he glanced down the advertisement column, with his head thrust forward and the paper flattened out upon his knee, I took a good look at the man and endeavoured, after the fashion of my companion, to read the indications which might be presented by his dress or appearance. I did not gain very much, however, by my inspection. Our visitor bore every mark of being an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow. He wore rather baggy grey shepherd’s check trousers, a not over-clean black frock-coat, unbuttoned in the front, and a drab waistcoat with a heavy brassy Albert chain, and a square pierced bit of metal dangling down as an ornament. A frayed top-hat and a faded brown overcoat with a wrinkled velvet collar lay upon a chair beside him. Altogether, look as I would, there was nothing remarkable about the man save his blazing red head, and the expression of extreme chagrin and discontent upon his features. Sherlock Holmes’ quick eye took in my occupation, and he shook his head with a smile as he noticed my questioning glances. “Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.” Mr. Jabez Wilson started up in his chair, with his forefinger upon the paper, but his eyes upon my companion. “How, in the name of good-fortune, did you know all that, Mr. Holmes?” he asked. “How did you know, for example, that I did manual labour. It’s as true as gospel, for I began as a ship’s carpenter.” “Your hands, my dear sir. Your right hand is quite a size larger than your left. You have worked with it, and the muscles are more developed.” “Well, the snuff, then, and the Freemasonry?” “I won’t insult your intelligence by telling you how I read that, especially as, rather against the strict rules of your order, you use an arc-and-compass breastpin.” “Ah, of course, I forgot that. But the writing?” “What else can be indicated by that right cuff so very shiny for five inches, and the left one with the smooth patch near the elbow where you rest it upon the desk?” “Well, but China?” “The fish that you have tattooed immediately above your right wrist could only have been done in China. I have made a small study of tattoo marks and have even contributed to the literature of the subject. That trick of staining the fishes’ scales of a delicate pink is quite peculiar to China. When, in addition, I see a Chinese coin hanging from your watch-chain, the matter becomes even more simple.” Mr. Jabez Wilson laughed heavily. “Well, I never!” said he. “I thought at first that you had done something clever, but I see that there was nothing in it, after all.” “I begin to think, Watson,” said Holmes, “that I make a mistake in explaining. ‘Omne ignotum pro magnifico,’ you know, and my poor little reputation, such as it is, will suffer shipwreck if I am so candid. Can you not find the advertisement, Mr. Wilson?” “Yes, I have got it now,” he answered with his thick red finger planted halfway down the column. “Here it is. This is what began it all. You just read it for yourself, sir.” I took the paper from him and read as follows: “TO THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE: On account of the bequest of the late Ezekiah Hopkins, of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, U. S. A., there is now another vacancy open which entitles a member of the League to a salary of 4 pounds a week for purely nominal services. All red-headed men who are sound in body and mind and above the age of twenty-one years, are eligible. Apply in person on Monday, at eleven o’clock, to Duncan Ross, at the offices of the League, 7 Pope’s Court, Fleet Street.” “What on earth does this mean?” I ejaculated after I had twice read over the extraordinary announcement. Holmes chuckled and wriggled in his chair, as was his habit when in high spirits. “It is a little off the beaten track, isn’t it?” said he. “And now, Mr. Wilson, off you go at scratch and tell us all about yourself, your household, and the effect which this advertisement had upon your fortunes. You will first make a note, Doctor, of the paper and the date.” “It is The Morning Chronicle of April 27, 1890. Just two months ago.” “Very good. Now, Mr. Wilson?” “Well, it is just as I have been telling you, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Jabez Wilson, mopping his forehead; “I have a small pawnbroker’s business at Coburg Square, near the City. It’s not a very large affair, and of late years it has not done more than just give me a living. I used to be able to keep two assistants, but now I only keep one; and I would have a job to pay him but that he is willing to come for half wages so as to learn the business.” “What is the name of this obliging youth?” asked Sherlock Holmes. “His name is Vincent Spaulding, and he’s not such a youth, either. It’s hard to say his age. I should not wish a smarter assistant, Mr. Holmes; and I know very well that he could better himself and earn twice what I am able to give him. But, after all, if he is satisfied, why should I put ideas in his head?” “Why, indeed? You seem most fortunate in having an employè who comes under the full market price. It is not a common experience among employers in this age. I don’t know that your assistant is not as remarkable as your advertisement.” “Oh, he has his faults, too,” said Mr. Wilson. “Never was such a fellow for photography. Snapping away with a camera when he ought to be improving his mind, and then diving down into the cellar like a rabbit into its hole to develop his pictures. That is his main fault, but on the whole he’s a good worker. There’s no vice in him.” “He is still with you, I presume?” “Yes, sir. He and a girl of fourteen, who does a bit of simple cooking and keeps the place clean—that’s all I have in the house, for I am a widower and never had any family. We live very quietly, sir, the three of us; and we keep a roof over our heads and pay our debts, if we do nothing more. “The first thing that put us out was that advertisement. Spaulding, he came down into the office just this day eight weeks, with this very paper in his hand, and he says: “‘I wish to the Lord, Mr. Wilson, that I was a red-headed man.’ “‘Why that?’ I asks. “‘Why,’ says he, ‘here’s another vacancy on the League of the Red-headed Men. It’s worth quite a little fortune to any man who gets it, and I understand that there are more vacancies than there are men, so that the trustees are at their wits’ en
Max Rushden and co discuss the Champions League, the battle for survival, a weekend preview and John Hartson’s underwear habits https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/audio/2018/mar/08/where-do-tottenham-and-psg-go-from-here-football-weekly-extra-podcast?CMP=share_btn_tw
Adventurers League is awesome and you should join! In this video series we will discuss the basics of playing in Adventurers League. Resources: New Adventurers League Member official introductory page : http://dndadventurersleague.org/start-here/ D&D Adventurers League Players pack and FAQ: http://www.dmsguild.com/m/product/208178 D&D 5e Adventurers League Official Site: dndadventurersleague.org Dungeons and Dragons Adventure League Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/DnDAdventurersLeague/ Please leave any questions, comments, or suggestions in the comments below and be sure to subscribe for updates and VIP treatment at the Inn! We strive to be your trusted source for information on 5e D&D Adventurers League! Subscribe for reviews on AL legal adventures, DMs Guild content, official rulings, and more! === Original video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Unxj9JQ6czw Downloaded by http://huffduff-video.snarfed.org/ on Thu, 22 Feb 2018 12:28:11 GMT Available for 30 days after download
September 8, 2016 KRISTA TIPPETT, HOST: I wasn’t aware of the mission statement of Wikipedia until recently: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” And a conversation with Jimmy Wales – one of the architects of that philosophy and the project and global community that has grown up around it – is full of surprises. What Wikipedia has been learning for 15 years now – about communally navigating facts and truth while honoring the integrity of many points of view — feels relevant right now. And I’ve never interviewed anyone who uses the word “kindness” more naturally and insistently than Jimmy Wales. MS. TIPPETT: Seth Godin used this phrase when he talked about what he sees in Wikipedia, “The insane power of the well-organized crowd.” MR. JIMMY WALES: [laughs] MS. TIPPETT: Which — again, it’s like — it takes the language of democracy to a slightly new 21st-century place. MR. WALES: I like that, “organized,” because a lot of what people refer to as online community in various places is not organized, and it’s atomistic is what I call it. So, an organized crowd is a group of people who are working together under a set of agreed principles for a common end, and hopefully doing that with a certain modicum of kindness to each other and thoughtfulness. And that is very special and has to be nurtured. It doesn’t happen automatically. MS. TIPPETT: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. [music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoe Keating] MS. TIPPETT: Jimmy Wales worked as a future and options trader early in his career and has created for-profit companies, but Wikipedia remains passionately non-profit. He lives between Florida and London, and grew up in Alabama. MS. TIPPETT: I’ve seen you referred to a few times that you grew up an atheist in Alabama, which is kind of poetic. And also a little counterintuitive. MR. WALES: A little, yeah. MS. TIPPETT: Mm-hmm. And your mother ran a two-room schoolhouse. Is that right? MR. WALES: Yes. Yeah, exactly. MS. TIPPETT: That’s so interesting. MR. WALES: Yeah, it was a very unusual, I would say, educational upbringing. Two-room schoolhouse, so like Abraham Lincoln or something. And we had four grades in each room — first through fourth grade, and then fifth through eighth grade. We also had a kindergarten, so it was technically a three-room. And yeah, I went there the whole time. And in my grade, there were four kids, so very small school. So we had a lot of flexibility and time to explore activities at our own choosing. MS. TIPPETT: So I’m always interested in this question, whoever I’m speaking with, of how they would describe the spiritual background of their childhood. And it seems to me that there are these virtues and values that run through your work about a kind of — there’s a kind of faith in community, and in human kindness, and kind of a trust in the goodness of people. I’m curious about where the roots of that are in this earliest life of yours. MR. WALES: Yeah, I do think there is something to that. I mean, certainly growing up in the South, my parents were very, very nice people, and we were always taught to be very nice people. And there is that kind of community sensibility I would say. MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. MR. WALES: And yeah, and so that was, I would say, a big part of how I was brought up. I mean, I just remember my father lamenting, because we lived in the big city of Huntsville, which was around 200,000 people, that unlike where he grew up in the countryside, when you met people driving down the street, they didn’t wave at you, which is sort of funny. I’m like, “Well, Dad, there’s a lot of them driving by, so…” MS. TIPPETT: [laughs] Right. MR. WALES: But it was that kind of thing. Like, people should be nice. And my father was a grocery store manager. And as such, he had had many, many, many people had worked for him over the years, young people. And everywhere we would go, people would come up to Dad, and they knew him and so forth, and always joked that he should run for mayor. But he never did. MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. And where do you trace the roots of your imagination about what an encyclopedia is and what it does in the world? I mean, did you have World Book Encyclopedia when you were growing up? MR. WALES: Yeah, yeah. We had the World Book at home from a very young age. My mother, in the classic style, bought it from a door-to-door salesperson when I was a baby. MS. TIPPETT: We’ll have to tell our kids those stories, and they won’t believe us, right? [laughs] MR. WALES: [laughs] Exactly. MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. MR. WALES: Yeah, there’s a great thing I show in my speeches. It’s a tweet from a school librarian who said, I asked one of my students if she knew what an encyclopedia was. And she said, is it something like Wikipedia? MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. Right. MR. WALES: So, for kids today, Wikipedia is ubiquitous. But yeah, in terms of growing up with the encyclopedia — and later on, of course, we had Britannica — it was something that I really loved as a child and read a lot. I can’t say I read it cover to cover, although I did have that ambition at times. But I read a lot of things in the encyclopedia. And I always liked, anything I wanted to know, to go and get a summary of it. And along with the annual book, they would send you stickers. And you could open up the original encyclopedia, and say there was an updated entry about the moon — people have landed on the moon — they update the moon entry. And then you would go and you would stick the sticker in the main book. So you’d look up moon, and it was say, “Oh, this article is out of date. Go and look in the 1976 edition.” And so now I think back on that, and that was the sort of the first editing the encyclopedia, by sticking stickers in it. [laughs] MS. TIPPETT: [laughs] Right. But they were stickers that somebody else had crafted, had written. MR. WALES: Someone else had crafted, exactly. Yeah. MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. And so, you started Wikipedia in 2001. I just wanted — that’s the date you use as well? 2001? MR. WALES: Yeah, mm-hmm. MS. TIPPETT: And I’m just curious about — just in terms of being something that is just woven into the fabric of life, and that kids grow up knowing about and using. And when you reflect on it, it’s really a very short time. And so, what was the germ of the idea? Like, what came first? What set this off to become the thing it became? MR. WALES: Yeah. So, I had been really impacted by the explosion of the internet. My family had a computer when I was — very early. Before the IBM PC came out, we had a TRS80 from Radio Shack computer, and the Commodore PET computer, and so forth. And one of the things that I saw in graduate school was the growth of open-source software, free software. And this is software that’s created primarily by volunteers, and they release on the internet under a completely free license. MS. TIPPETT: Right. MR. WALES: And one thing that a lot of people don’t know unless you work in the industry is that a lot of the really fantastic software that runs the internet, GNU Linux, Apache Pearl, MySQL, PHP, all of the programming languages and things are open source projects that are created by volunteer programmers collaborating online. So I was watching that thing grow. And of course, when I first heard about it, I thought, “Well, that’s an interesting idea, but obviously that’s just going to be a small hobby thing.” But as it became more and more impactful, and it was more and more becoming a fundamental part of the internet, I thought, “Gee, that kind of collaboration could extend beyond just software into all kinds of cultural works.” And it sort of makes sense that it would start with software, because programmers who wanted to share their work with each other could build the tools that they needed to do that. So they could build their own tools, and they have version control software, so they can check in and out their changes and work together collaboratively. And for the rest of us, if we wanted to collaborate on some kind of a document, the best you could do is email a Word document or something like that, which is a nightmare. MS. TIPPETT: Right. MR. WALES: And so, I thought, basically, we need some tools. We need to figure out how to make this work. And I had the idea of an encyclopedia. And I got very excited about it. And thought it’s the kind of thing that people could collaborate on. It’s fairly straightforward to understand what it should look like. And that was how we got started. But of course, in the initial version, called Nupedia, we didn’t have all the ideas of how to do it, and how to build a community, and what kind of software they needed, and so forth. MS. TIPPETT: Did you have, from the beginning, this kind of mission statement that you’re providing “free access to the sum of all human knowledge for all people?” Was that there at the beginning or did it evolve? MR. WALES: Well, yeah, that concept was there at the beginning. The actual sort of famous tagline, “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge” — that I came up with in about — I don’t remember exactly — 2004, 2005. Maybe a little earlier, maybe 2003. Anyway, I know where I was. I was in Berlin. It was my first time out of the U.S. I’d been invited to a conference to speak in Berlin, which was mind-boggling to me that anybody would want me to come all the way to Europe, and give a talk, and sort of had to sort of sum up what it was we were doing. But the concept, that mission statement, was with us from the very beginning. MS. TIPPETT: And it’s very straightforward and simple on one hand, and it’s grand and audacious on the other, “the sum of all human knowledge.” MR. WALES: Yeah. And I do think that is part of why it’s been successful, I think had I set out to sort of — “Let’s write an encyclopedia article abo
Krista Tippett, host: Theoretical physicist Lisa Randall started out seeking answers to questions in Standard Model physics and ventured into pondering extra-dimensional worlds. Now she’s moved into illuminating what she calls “the astounding interconnectedness” between fields which have previously operated more autonomously — astronomy, biology, paleontology. She’s pursuing a theory that dark matter might have created the cosmic event that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs and hence, humanity’s rise as a species. We explore what she’s discovering, as well as the human questions and takeaways her work throws into relief. [music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoe Keating] Lisa Randall: It’s OK to be aware of our limitations as human beings, that these are things that make it harder. It doesn’t make it impossible. And that’s the beauty of science, is that we can go beyond these prejudices, if you like, these intuitions that we have built on our ordinary, everyday experience that allows us to think about things that seem obviously wrong. They’re not obviously wrong, they’re just not obvious to us. [music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoe Keating] Ms. Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. [music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoe Keating] Ms. Tippett: Lisa Randall is the author of bestselling books for non-scientists, and she is the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. I spoke with her in 2015. Ms. Tippett: It was interesting for me to read that you grew up in Queens and that you’ve said that as a young girl, you were more entranced with books like Alice in Wonderland than the scientific books you came across. Ms. Randall: I actually don’t think I came across that many scientific books as a kid. Basically, I went to the library and read what I could. I just enjoyed reading. I liked the sense of adventure and play. But yeah, I can’t say that I’m really one of those people that said I really wanted to understand the stars. We didn’t actually see that many stars where I was. I think it was later on that I really came to appreciate nature more, really starting, probably, in graduate school, when I started hiking and exercising more. Ms. Tippett: I have to say, looking at the website at Harvard — it’s The Center for the Fundamental Laws of Nature, the High Energy Theory Group. [laughs] Ms. Randall: So I am totally not responsible for that name, which I find really arrogant and obnoxious. And I don’t think we’re responsible for the fundamental laws of nature. I think we’re responsible for the laws of nature that we can understand. Ms. Tippett: Yeah — it is very lofty. Ms. Randall: It’s not just lofty, it’s misleading. I think it’s misleading, because I think it gives this nature of science as ‘”We have this starting point, and then we derive everything.” But really, that’s not how it works. We try to find the starting point; we conjecture some theories. But we also try to work backwards, seeing what we observe and trying to see how those pieces fit together. So it’s really a push and pull. It’s not just one. Ms. Tippett: That’s such an interesting way to state it. Here’s something you wrote: “Our world is rich — so rich that two of the most important questions particle physicists ask are: Why this richness? How is all the matter that I see related?” And I just wanted to ask you to explain what you’re describing there. What does “richness” mean in the context of what you do — in that sentence? Ms. Randall: Well, I think part of what I’m referring to is simply the fact that we really don’t know how to explain why certain particles are essential to the world we live in. We know, for example, that nuclei have what we call up and down quarks inside them. But there are heavier versions. What role do they play? We know there are electrons, but there are heavier versions of the electron known as the muon and the tau. So there’s particles beyond what seem essential to nature or us or life, and we don’t really understand why they’re there. There doesn’t necessarily have to be a reason, but we’d like to see, is it somehow essential to getting us to this point in the world? So that’s part of what I’m referring to there. Ms. Tippett: So richness is just that variety of particles and qualities that’s known and unknown. Ms. Randall: I mean there is, of course, also the richness of how the pieces fit together, which is the wonderful stuff that we observe in the world. And we can see how that fits together and then how that came about and try to understand that with science, over time. So it’s kind of twofold. It’s sort of the richness at the fundamental level, but it’s also the richness of the complexity that derives from that, those simple ingredients. Ms. Tippett: And it seems that the period in which you have been a scientist, these last few decades — when did you get your Ph.D.? Ms. Randall: [laughs] I hate having to answer that, because it gives away my age. But I got my Ph.D. in ’87. But I will remind you that I took three years as my undergraduate and four years as a graduate student. Ms. Tippett: [laughs] All right, all right. But what I’m getting at is just how it’s a short — let’s just call it a very short period of time. You’re young. It’s a handful of decades. But the scientific understanding of that richness that you were just describing, even in this period, has been so revolutionary. Ms. Randall: It’s true, it’s been a very exciting time to be a physicist. I kind of joke that I’ve kind of lived in the optimal time. I mean I think some guys might say they would have liked to have been around earlier, but I think I’m at a very good time, because not only is science exciting, but it’s also a time that allows you to be a woman physicist a little more easily. So I feel like I live in the optimal time for me being a physicist. But I think, also — in terms of physics, I think the last century has just seen amazing developments. I mean cosmology wasn’t truly a science until the last century, until Einstein developed his theory of general relativity, and observations improved to the point that we could actually see what’s going on and make predictions. Particle physics really only developed — nuclear physics — all the physics I worked on is a product of, basically, the last century. Ms. Tippett: It just occurred to me — I’m kind of embarrassed to ask this question, because I feel like I should understand it. But I feel like the word — the language of cosmology and physics gets interchanged, at least in non-science circles. I mean how do you distinguish between those things? Ms. Randall: So the other thing that gets confused is astronomy, so let me try to distinguish all of them. So physics I think of as the fundamental laws of nature. So for me, physics is elementary particle physics, but there’s all sorts of physics, which are sort of the rules by which things work. Cosmology is a specific science. It has to do with how the universe itself evolved. It has to do with the Big Bang theory, the theory of cosmological inflation, all of which I talk about in my latest book. But it has to do with just how things evolved to where they are today. Astronomy is more, in a sense, looking at stars and looking at the actual objects, how they develop, putting together. So what I like to think is, physicists are looking for sort of fundamental ingredients, astronomers are putting them together in a particular way to describe what we see today, and cosmology tells you how we got to this point. And of course, they all intertwine. They’re not completely disconnected. But someone will usually identify as an astronomer or a cosmologist or a physicist. Ms. Tippett: That’s really helpful. Thank you. Ms. Randall: Good that you asked. Ms. Tippett: Well, I just suddenly realized that… Ms. Randall: I always get mislabeled, actually, so it’s pretty funny. Ms. Tippett: Yeah, so — well, let’s just leap in. Let’s just go to dark matter. And this book you’ve written this year also has this wonderful title: Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs. Ms. Randall: Thank you. Ms. Tippett: And let’s do some definition of terms, up front. I mean dark matter is, we now believe, perhaps 85 percent of the matter in the universe. Just start there. How would you talk about… Ms. Randall: So people get very disturbed about the idea of dark matter. They say, “How could there be all this matter that we don’t see?” But there’s a lot of stuff that we don’t see. If the history of physics has taught us anything, it’s — or biology or any other field of science — it’s how much we don’t see. And dark matter, I would have — if it was up to me, I probably would have called it transparent matter. It’s matter that doesn’t interact with light. Dark stuff, as you know, absorbs light, so you see it. But dark matter, it’s matter. It interacts with gravity like the matter we know. It clumps. It’s around here, in our galaxy. But it doesn’t interact with light, so we literally don’t see it. We see its gravitational effects, but we haven’t seen other effects. We know it’s there because of the many gravitational influences of large amounts of dark matter, but an individual dark matter particle has so far eluded detection. Ms. Tippett: I mean let’s clarify what ordinary matter — when we usually say “matter” — non-dark matter is… Ms. Randall: So it’s the stuff that’s all around us. It’s all matter. It’s all part of what we’re made of. It’s part of Earth. It’s people. It’s the galaxy. But there’s also dark matter surrounding us, it’s just a lot less dense in our vicinity. Nonetheless, there’s billions of dark matter particles going through us all the time. Ms. Tippett: Right now, even. Ms. Randall: Yep, right now. But we don’t see them, and they don’t interact with us. We don’t feel them. We don’t smell them. They don’t interact with our senses. People are trying to devise very clever ways to look for very subtle, small effects, but so far as we
Music video by White Zombie performing More Human Than Human. (C) 1995 Geffen Records === Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0E0ynyIUsg&list=PLf7fnw8RkLVda0FdsKI1Eddf0NQOLwuxe&index=13 Downloaded by http://huffduff-video.snarfed.org/ on Wed, 27 Sep 2017 02:45:15 GMT Available for 30 days after download
National Music Academy presents Snarky Puppy band leader Michael League in a 90 minute masterclass on musically directing and managing a global touring, grammy award winning ensemble Snarky Puppy. Michael also speaks about Musicianship, Songwriting and the Music Industry. === Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WqU1uHbBt8&feature=youtu.be&t=18m10s Downloaded by http://huffduff-video.snarfed.org/ on Sun, 25 Jun 2017 18:52:51 GMT Available for 30 days after download
Senator Bob Runciman (Chair) in the chair. The Chair: Good afternoon and welcome, colleagues, invited guests and members of the general public who are following today’s proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs. Today, we continue our consideration of Bill C‑16, An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code, with this our last day of hearings on the bill. We will move to clause-by-clause consideration tomorrow. With us today for the first hour are Jordan B. Peterson, Professor, Psychology Department, University of Toronto; and from the D. Jared Brown Professional Corporation, D. Jared Brown, Lead Counsel. Thank you, gentlemen, for being here. You both have up to five minutes for opening statements. I believe you will lead off, professor. The floor is yours. Jordan B. Peterson, Professor, Psychology Department, University of Toronto, as an individual: I think the first thing I’d like to bring up is that it’s not obvious, when considering a matter of this sort, what level of analysis is appropriate. If you’re reading any given document, you can look at the words or phrases or sentences or the complete document, or you can look at the broader context within which it is likely to be interpreted. When I first encountered Bill C‑16 and its surrounding policies, it seemed to me that the appropriate level of analysis was to look at the context of interpretation surrounding the bill, which is what I did when I scoured the Ontario Human Rights Commission web pages and examined its policies. I did that because at that point, the Department of Justice had clearly indicated on their website, in a link that was later taken down, that Bill C‑16 would be interpreted within the policy precedents already established by the Ontario Human Rights Commission. So when I looked on the website, I thought there were broader issues at stake here, and I tried to outline some of those broader issues. You may or may not know that I made some videos criticizing Bill C‑16 and a number of the policies surrounding it. I think the most egregious elements of the policies are that it requires compelled speech. The Ontario Human Rights Commission explicitly states that refusing to refer to a person by their self-identified name and proper personal pronoun, which are the pronouns I was objecting to, can be interpreted as harassment. That’s explicitly defined in the relevant policies. I think that’s appalling, first of all, because there hasn’t been a piece of legislation that requires Canadians to utter a particular form of address that has particular ideological implications before, and I think it’s a line we shouldn’t cross. The definition of identity that’s enshrined in the surrounding policies is ill-defined, poorly thought through and also incorrect. It’s incorrect in that identity is not and will never be something that people define subjectively because your identity is something you actually have to act out in the world as a set of procedural tools, which most people learn – and I’m being technical about this – between the ages of two and four. It’s a fundamental human reality. It’s well recognized by the relevant, say, developmental psychological authorities. The idea that identity is something you define purely subjectively is an idea without status as far as I’m concerned. I also think it’s unbelievably dangerous for us to move towards representing a social constructionist view of identity in our legal system. The social constructionist view insists that human identity is nothing but a consequence of socialization, and there’s an inordinate amount of scientific evidence suggesting that that happens to not be the case. So the reason that this is being instantiated into law is because the people who are promoting that sort of perspective, or at least in part because the people promoting that sort of perspective, know perfectly well they’ve lost the battle completely on scientific grounds. It’s implicit in the policies of the Ontario Human Rights Commission that sexual identity, biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, sexual proclivity all vary independently, and that’s simply not the case. It’s not the case scientifically. It’s not the case factually, and it’s certainly not something that should be increasingly taught to people in high schools, elementary schools and junior high schools, which it is. It is being taught. I included this cartoon character that I find particularly reprehensible, aimed obviously as it is at children somewhere around the age of seven, that contains within it the implicit claims, as a consequence of its graphic mode of expression, that these elements of identity are, first, canonical and, second, independent. Neither of those happen to be the case. I think that the inclusion of gender expression in the bill is something extraordinarily peculiar, given that gender expression is not a group and that, according to the Ontario Human Rights Commission, it deals with things as mundane as behaviour and outward appearance, such as dress, hair, makeup, body language and voice, which now, as far as I can tell, open people to charges of hate crime under Bill C‑16 if they dare to criticize the manner of someone’s dress, which seems to me to be an entirely voluntary issue. I think that the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s attitude towards vicarious liability is designed specifically to be punitive in that it makes employers responsible for harassment or discrimination, including the failure to use preferred pronouns. The Chair: Please come to a conclusion. Mr. Peterson: They have vicarious liability for that, whether or not they know it’s happening and whether or not the harassment was intended or unintended. So I’ll stop with that. The Chair: Thank you. Mr. Brown. D. Jared Brown, Lead Counsel, D. Jared Brown Professional Corporation: I’m a litigator in Toronto. I act in all manner of commercial and employment disputes. I’m not an academic. I live with my clients in the land of legal reality and how the law actually works. About two years ago, I began to see claims of discrimination included in every employment-related court claim. My phone now rings weekly with Human Rights Tribunal matters. It has become a reality for employers across Canada. In August of last year, I became aware of Dr. Jordan Peterson. He was discussing what he saw as a problematic law, poorly written. That’s when I observed the oddest thing happening; lawyers, academic lawyers, important people, began to say that he had the legal stuff wrong. “Nothing unusual about this bill.” They also said, “You don’t get to go to jail if you breach a Human Rights Tribunal order.” What was happening is they weren’t defending the law but downplaying its effects. As a practising lawyer, any time a lawyer, and particularly an academic, says, “Look away; there’s nothing to see here,” it gets my antenna way up. So I did some research, which can be found in the brief that I filed in advance of today. It sets out the path to prison on this. I knew, as a commercial litigator, that anyone can end up in jail if you breach a tribunal order. It is a simple, civil, contempt-of-court process. People go to jail for this. But what about the freedom of expression issue? It’s a foundational issue. We all know that section 2(b) of the Charter sets out that everybody has the fundamental freedoms of thought, belief, opinion and expression. We all know that the government has successfully restricted freedom of expression over the years. But what if, rather than restricting what you can’t say, the government actually mandated what you must say? In other words, instead of legislating that you cannot defame someone, for instance, the government says, “When you speak about a particular subject, let’s say gender, you must use this government-approved set of words and theories.” The American jurisprudence clearly defines this as unconstitutional compelled speech. In Canada, the Supreme Court has enunciated the principle that anything that forces someone to express opinions that are not their own is a penalty that is totalitarian and, as such, alien to the tradition of free nations like Canada. How does Bill C‑16 get us to compelled speech? The Minister of Justice has summarized Bill C‑16 as: The enactment amends the Canadian Human Rights Act to add gender identity and expression to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination. The Department of Justice website used to say that we must look to the Ontario Human Rights Commission policies for definitions on these terms. Ontario’s policies on gender identity and gender expression are set out in my brief. They state that gender-based harassment can involve refusing to refer to a person by their self-identified name and proper personal pronoun. Refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity will likely be discrimination. The law is otherwise unsettled as to whether someone can insist on any one gender-neutral pronoun in particular. If the harasser didn’t know or didn’t intend to harass, it’s still harassment. Why is this important? In Ontario, the Human Rights Commission is a policy-development creature of the legislature. It creates the policies that interpret the code. But what is most important is that the tribunal must follow these policies. It is bound by them. So the commission creates the law on pronouns. In Ontario, the policies on pronouns were introduced into the legal framework after the law had left the legislature. Federally, the same process will be followed, as the Department of Justice had said so. A similar guideline will be developed. As with the Ontario policies, federal guidelines must be followed by the federal tribunal. The guidelines will mandate pronouns. This will happen after the bill leaves the Senate. Mandating use of pronouns requires one to use words